I’ll be honest: I generally hold people I don’t like in quite low regard. By quite low I mean bottom-of-the-well low, so low that there’s nothing worth hearing from them. Those I hold in high regard, on the other hand, can do and say no wrong, or if they do I, in my grace, grant them the benefit of the doubt.
I prefer people to be either angels or demons, sinners or saints, good or bad. I think that makes me normal.
We all think like that, don’t we? It’s so convenient to sort people into the good box or the bad box, and then place the boxes very far away from each other because there shall be no fraternizing between the two boxes. No one who is voting for the candidate I despise could be a basically decent, honorable human being, so into the bad box she goes. And certainly some guy who thinks differently about Queer issues or race or feminism has nothing of any value to say to me, which is fine because my bad box has room for scum like him anyway. My good box, on the other hand, is full of people who I’ve deemed okay, safe, convenient, and right, because they agree with me. Really, my good box is full of people who do nothing for me but validate my existence because I’m insecure and don’t want to admit it. But that’s normal. (Right?)
The problem with this system (besides the fact that its sole purpose is to fuel the ego) is that it strips the humanity away from the people in our lives, good and bad.
On the one hand, people are broken and contemptible. So much so, in fact, that most make a pretty good case for keeping the bad box in business. I mean, Brock Turner raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and a whole flock of equally icky people rushed to minimize his atrocity- including the judge who sentenced him to a measly six months in prison and the journalists who called him a “swimmer” instead of a rapist and reported his olympic level swim times, as if that information was pertinent to the telling of a heinous crime.
But on the other hand, people are so, so good. Consider the collective national effort among the people of Denmark to protect their Jewish citizens during the Nazi occupation. And what of those firefighters and police officers who rushed into the burning Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001?
Are we humans capable of great evil or marvelous good? Our box system would have us choose, but the rational among us know that our system isn’t adequate, only easy. We don’t let ourselves consider whether those heroic 9/11 first responders had any wife-beating alcoholics in their ranks, nor do we find it feasible to imagine that Brock Turner’s judge probably has children or nieces and nephews who think the world of him. Do these probabilities negate the value of these individuals’ actions? No. But they do negate the boxes.
So what are we left with?
Perhaps we’re left with a bucket. No other sorting option, just a bucket. And that bucket holds all of us humans, at once complex and simple, broken and good, sinner and saint. The best- and worst, if you ask me – thing about the bucket system is that it calls us to compassion, discernment and relationship with those around us, those who we are forced to fraternize with because they’re in our bucket. Be it glorious or a chore (or a glorious chore), this is what it means to be a human; acknowledging each other for all of our complexities, good, bad, and complicated.