Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s change of heart on gay marriage
does in fact represent an admirable degree of open-mindedness, but why did it
take him so long? (turns out he knew his son was gay and never mentioned it while he was being considered as a VP candidate) Of course I don’t know
him, and it might be a tad presumptuous of me to speculate, but hey, that’s what
we do here.
Here’s what I suspect of most Republicans and how Portman’s
new perspective seems so representative of it:
prior to his son’s coming out, Portman, like many Republicans, was
convinced he knew better than anyone else.
He was sure that being gay was just wrong, morally, legally,
fundamentally wrong. In his mind, prior
to his son’s announcement, Portman’s beliefs had very little to do with anyone
other than Rob Portman. If your life
didn’t look like his life, you were probably wrong.
That probably sounds worse than it is, after all, we can
only see the world through our own eyes and compare it to our own
experience. But at some point we have to
grow up and accept the fact that just as we can ONLY see the world through our
own eyes, every other individual in the world can only see it through his or
her own eyes as well. No one has our
same experience nor do we have the exact same experience as anyone else. In Senator Portman’s case, prior to his son’s
epiphany, he apparently never considered that someone else’s experience might
actually lead to a different perspective than the one he held. Until it affected him personally, it was not
an experience he was capable of or willing to accept or consider. I think it’s
safe to say Dick Cheney’s experience was similar. Ditto Mark Sanford whose Appalachian Trail
lie covered up the kind of sin that he so loudly protested before he got
caught. That is, until it affected him
personally, before it became part of his own experience.
The problem as I see it is in this “growing up” part of the
equation. As mentioned, we all see the
world from our own limited perspective, but as adults seeking to function in
the larger world, we have the burden of acknowledging other perspectives exist,
and accepting they may even have as much merit as our own. I know this argument won’t convince some
people that gay marriage should exist, but it is an argument far more basic
than that. It’s called empathy, and when
adults don’t have it, we generally consider them sociopaths. Even worse, adults who can’t or won’t (and what’s
the difference?) acknowledge the merit of different ideas purposefully limit
their own ability and experience in the world. They limit what contributions
they make to the world and they limit what they can get from the world. If you can’t imagine a world other than your
own, it’s as if you’re admitting you are incapable of solving any problem that
you personally have never encountered.
It’s closing yourself off to creativity or new ideas or
discoveries. After all, these things
were not part of the past you experienced, and you won’t consider ideas,
thoughts, concepts that aren’t already part of your past experience. You have basically reduced yourself to a
drone, plodding along, marching toward your own death. No wonder so few Republicans are
atheists! I’d want to believe in an
afterlife too if that’s how I lived this one.
This issue isn’t just an abstraction either. In concrete terms, the inability to imagine a
life other than our own plays out on a tactical level. It’s hard to imagine that the ability to
afford a car and insurance payment makes me richer than most of the people in
the world. (According to the CIA
Factbook, the worldwide average annual
income is around $5500.) For even lower middle class Americans, this is simply
unfathomable. We can’t begin to imagine
what that kind of life might be like. So
folks who cannot acknowledge something like that can’t possibly understand why
those folks might not see college as a viable or even desirable option. Folks who can only relate to their own
experience fail to understand why these people can’t just pick themselves up by
their bootstraps and build a business and end up millionaires because, after
all, America is the land of opportunity.
It’s hard for even lower middle class Americans to imagine
growing up in a bad neighborhood where getting killed or going to prison before
your 18th birthday is 10 times more likely than graduating from high
school. For too many of us, such a life
simply doesn’t exist, except, maybe, for people who CHOOSE to live it for some
unknown reason. When you can’t imagine
those circumstances then you can’t understand why those people also don’t see
college as an option..because baic survivial takes up all their philosophical thought
time. And when you can’t see that, you
naturally blame them for the circumstances surrounding them. You wonder, often aloud, why can’t these
people just work harder and make something of themselves? Wouldn’t they feel more self-respect from a
minimum wage job than from public assistance?
You can’t imagine that some kind of public healthcare for their kids
(since for-profit healthcare is neither affordable nor available to folks with
minimum wage jobs) might be more important to them than their own self respect
or resume building.
If you didn’t grow up in a town where everyone worked in the
mill, or the steel plant, or the auto factory, or the farm, standing, using
their hands and backs, heavy lifting, hard work, long days, for generations,
where it has long been instilled that “real work” makes you sore and tired at
the end of the day, then you probably can’t understand why the idea of a desk
job NEVER factored in to their post high school plans, and thus you can’t
possibly empathize with the fact that they simply don’t know where to turn now
that the farm is a golf course, the mill, factory, plant have been moved to
China or somewhere where worker safety and environmental stewardship have yet
to figure into the cost of doing business.
Even if you worked in a clean, safe, well-lit American
factory, you probably can’t understand why workers elsewhere might believe
their ability to unite is a matter of life and death, rather than just whining for a raise (because whining for a raise is the only idea in your experience).
Until something happens to you personally, you can’t seem to
wrap your brain around it. It’s kind of
childish or at least immature. So
forgive me for not celebrating Senator Portman’s sudden enlightenment. My question remains: if a person hasn’t matured enough to be able
to consider the perspectives of others, what makes them think they’re capable
of leading others? And if people who
lack empathy are considered sociopaths, then how are they even eligible for and
how do they keep winning elections to public office?
Luth,
Out.
