If You’re Not With Us You’re Against Us
The biggest fence-sitters in the world instructed President Bush to say those words in a speech to the world after the USA was bombed on September 11, 2001.
I’ve heard Black activists and non-heterosexual activists say the same. In fact people in support of any issue say it. Not everyone, but enough that it became commonplace.
That sentence leaves out a large swath of people including me.
I’m not for you or against you. I seek to understand you. Why an individual or group does what they do is my internal question. I’m not a fan and don’t seek friendships. I consider everyone I encounter worthy of my consideration and concern.
The more familiar I become the more comfortable I become.
I don’t criticize individuals or groups with whom I’m not familiar or comfortable.
Wanting me to treat you differently than someone else won’t happen. I resist being told who to like, love, dislike or hate.
I don’t think, speak or talk from a position of hate or love. That, for whatever reason got left out of my DNA.
No individual or group can determine what is hate or love for another individual or group.
If non-heterosexual individuals or other groups are offended by the way I write, it’s because I write the way they talk. When they change the way they talk, I’ll change the way I write.
- With one exception – calling people names by referencing their body parts or functions below the waist or referencing their brains as a way to express anger or disgust.
At home alone I say fuck or shit when I move furniture or use a hammer and injure myself. I’ve started saying worse than that out loud just to see how it feels and I don’t like it.
The British say it makes them feel good to call people by their genitalia or what comes out of their body orifices, or at least that’s what they want the world to think. All the countries they colonized do it, so I’m wondering if it makes them feel good too or if they just say it does. I don’t know. I don’t like it, so I don’t use it as a strategy to make someone back down. My goal is to understand and enlighten not to make someone do anything.
I’ve never called anyone nigger even in my mind. I don’t like to hear it when I frequent places where Blacks frequent. Maybe they say it so much to keep white people away. They know it offends white people; they’re usually looking up, scanning the people for reactions when they say it. Not always.
- I’ll bet Will Smith, the actor, has said it a lot. In the article recently written about the word, he only spoke about other white people using it, not his own usage. You have to be able to look at yourself and not demand of others what you don’t demand of yourself. He called the people who use it stupid, which must make him stupid too (that’s is call not mine). Only five or six people ever said it to his face and evidently none of them were Black. He must not hang out with black people.
The same goes for any other individual or group who claims to be offended by anything I write.
I know in advance that you’re not offended. That’s my level of understanding and confidence. In fact, I know that you wonder how I know so much about you. “How does she know us?”
I’m a natural observer not a spy. I absorb human and other animal behavior. That’s probably why I’m not dead already. I saw a blue-eyed gnat with orange-red eye lashes once in Olympia, Washington at a beach house I rented. I called it a flea back then, because I didn’t know any gnats. Never heard the word. And I had two dogs. By the way I don’t call anybody dogs – ever.
What you fear when I write ‘how you talk’ is what others not like me will think of you. You know it’s not hate-talk just like I know Blacks don’t hate all white people.
Blacks are natural born actors. They’ll cry real tears to convince you of something or when they get nervous – about anything. If they’re crying in front of anybody, it’s a show.
I can’t cry on cue. But anybody could pretend to. The Blacks use it as a tool to force you to believe something that isn’t true. I could sweet-talk anybody, but it’s not real, so I choose not to do it.
I could troll you with the best of them, using only solid arguments absent name-calling, but fighting and forcing my view on you isn’t in my bag of tools. In fact, all the tools I have at my disposal I share with everybody.
I show you how to do it absent the hate, absent the malice. If you choose to call that effort hate or any one of the ism words, then I can’t help you. And I’m not going to spend much time trying. I, unlike you, don’t work from an agenda related foundation built on harming some in order to help others.
If you fear that someone else’s words, using reason, will be misconstrued, and that only your words, used to hurt and humiliate your perceived opposition, will get the desired results, and level the playing field, then you didn’t consider everyone in your paradigm or strategy. To be truly successful everyone wins.
The people who say, ‘if you’re not with us you’re against us’ have only their interests in mind, not the interests of everyone. It’s their way or the highway.
There are a lot of bitter people, who after 911 were forced to take actions they didn’t want to take, actions expected and demanded, that were not in the best interest of their corresponding countries and regions. But they knew if they didn’t there would be consequences that their countries could not have sustained.
Those bitter feelings are operative in the world today – long after 911. So be careful about forcing views and actions using humiliation, extortion, blackmail, violence or threats of harm to achieve your ends. Long after you achieved what you wanted, those you hurt will remember and come back at you when you least expect it.
And every one of them has a family.
SHARON ON THE NEWS™ 