A Lament and An Explanation
The Road I Travel is slow going and without a lot of details… but I suppose, that’s the way it is in general. It’s important though to understand at the very least my feelings and my thoughts on how it is I am where I am today instead of just knowing that I am here. It’s an attempt, though feeble and perhaps ultimately fruitless, at avoiding a label. Labels are destructive and dehumanizing. It’s part of how the Nazi’s brainwashed Germany into killing “Jews” and not Jewish people. If I merely subscribe to allowing myself being labeled without some form of explanation, my road is lost on all those I encounter for all they will see is the label. I, like the rest of us, am more than a label – I am a person and hope to be treated with the dignity that accords.
Yet, it is also curious how willingly people will subscribe to labels. They welcome being treated and talked to as a thing and not a person. I suppose, perhaps, that it may be so that they can shirk responsibility for what it is they cling to – “I’m just saying that’s what my religion says. Tough cookies for you if you want me to talk about it.” Or perhaps they truly are certain that the label is representative of all that they are – but that’s a tough pill to swallow for the rest of us (or at least me) I think. I don’t dislike people who identify themselves as or with a label; they just frustrate me because sometimes (if not all the time) they deliberately have nothing personal to say.
Certainly labels and categories have their place concerning our ideas about people. It forms the basis of our identity with people and how we talk to people. But the role of the label is diminished in active relationships and active dialog, and that’s what I’m trying to build in some way here.
If I can encourage you to be more than a label, then maybe Coming Clean about The Road I Travel isn’t as fruitless as I think it might ultimately be.
Labels facilitate communication. Ask me what I do for a living, and it’s hard for me to describe in under 50 words without me resorting to the far more brief, “I’m an aerospace engineer and a goverment contractor.”
Ask me about my religious leanings, and I could spend an hour talking to you, but I could roundly sum it up with, “I’m a Methodist,” even if I’m not 100% Methodist or 100% Wesleyan.
Labels are shorthand. You’re right in saying that there’s lots of danger regarding them—and lots of that has to do with skewed perceptions of what labels mean—but they do provide a way to be brief. Strunk & White would be happy.
I’m not lamenting Labels as Shorthand or Identification.
I’m lamenting Labels as Personification.
Well, that’s certainly a problem with them. It’s easy to do.
Personifications are never accurate. :no: