My mother has a crystal punch bowl as a somewhat-prized possession.
I don’t personally care much for that sort of thing, but I’m not judging her. These sorts of objects have become less relevant for each increasingly-commodified generation, but plenty of people still have precious things that might require special treatment or only come out for special occasions.
Growing up, the main thing us kids understood about the crystal punch bowl was we enjoyed the novelty of using it, but it needed a bit more care than normal, to prevent it being chipped by the poor spatial navigation of a dinner plate, or slipping onto the tiled kitchen floor. We understood it required special treatment and rules, not because it was any more functional than other containers, but because it was unique enough that there was treasure to be found in experiencing it.
There were basically three options mum had to convey its value to her children:
She could lock away the crystal bowl. We might vaguely know of its existence, but never really experience it.
She could make clear rules about how we should act around the crystal bowl, so we would value and respect it even if we didn’t fully understand why.
She could spend time, patiently explaining the value and fragility of the bowl until we were mature enough to understand and respect it; then let us use it.
This shouldn’t be news to you, but we are also fragile wee things.
Our confidence and spirit make us kind-of bad at realising it but, in the big, mean, universe there’s a lot more stuff that will sooner fuck us up than comfortably cushion and sustain our bodies and minds.
Even here, on our miraculous pale blue dot made of the mind-bendingly-rare perfect combination of ‘stuff for life’, we have Antarctica, the Inland Taipan, cyanide, gravity, hurricanes, botulism, cancer, entropy, and much, much more to convincingly dispatch us.
We might enjoy the tale of humanity as a series of heroic extra-human achievements but, practically, our history has basically been a mostly-dull struggle against our own fragility—fighting, innovating, collaborating, and questing to gather up the right combination of sustenance, shelter, inspiration, and love.
The thing is, all that stuff we’ve struggled to gather—all this stuff which has carried us from grunting cave dwellings, to intraplanetary soaring in business-class comfort—is absolutely dependent on collaboration.
We exist at a time broadly characterised by a ‘Me’ attitude: A combined obsession with private attainment, guided by the ‘market’, and all presented in media unable to see beyond the concentration of credit for human progress onto singular ‘Great (wo)Men’. Under those conditions, it’s easy to forget just how brittle we each are.
What got me thinking about all this was a recent trip to the USA. The US has issues, like everywhere, but one thing I noticed there was how much more accessible many things were: Wide automated doors and ramps, alternative ways of interacting with payment and ordering terminals, large-print and multi-lingual signs and announcements, day-glow grippy strips on stairs…
Don’t get me wrong, it really wasn’t anything amazing—just a little better than we seem to have mustered in my part of the world.
This is kind of an aside, but I saw a visually impaired person (with a literal cane) walking through Manhattan. Like everyone in NYC, he had to cross a street full of impatient and entitled drivers every couple of minutes to progress in any direction. Navigating Manhatten for sighted people involves the accessible logic of a numbered and alphabetised one-way system, where pedestrians can (and the locals certainly do) quickly scan each relevant feeder street as they near a crossing, then largely ignore the crosswalk signals, even in the city’s hazardous heart… But, if you can’t actually visually take that information in, and there seems to be few audible buzzers to tell you it’s safe to cross, and the centre of Manhatten is an every-direction-bustle of other pedestrians at any time of day or night... Shit. Better ramps and stuff notwithstanding, that guy was clearly a legend!
Whether you love or hate the US legal system, you have to credit the threat of lawsuits with their improved accessibility. The point is, no US building owner is spending thousands on wheelchair ramps and automatic doors (plus the regular maintenance they require) out of the goodness of their heart.
But they should.
Following years of jumping off play forts and doing other stupid “manly” [sic] shit with my friends when I was younger, my knees have the occasional “moment of weakness”. But, beyond that, I’m lucky enough to be healthy and able, with good hearing, vision and mental health, an owned home, ‘white’ skin, a good job, and X-Y chromosomes. As such (ignoring my knees) you’d probably think of me as “normally abled” but, actually, that combination makes me anything-but. In any snap-shot of the population, it is much more “normal” to have some kind of age- or genetic- or social- or trauma-related disability or disadvantage. Aside from anything else, even us ‘normal’ types only get to be our peak selves for a fleeting few years, and no number of ice-baths, meditation, sudoku puzzles, or Brazil nut diets can really change that all that much.
So, a not-insignificant number of us either start, or find themselves, on the less lucky side of the ledger than “normal”, and face a world not set up for them. And the rest of us start as useless babies, completely dependent on others to care for us; enjoy a few good self-sufficent years; then get old and generally need help again.
Sometimes our fragility is overt: A person stopped in their wheelchair beneath a frustrating flight of stairs, or that visually-impaired New Yorker. But, more often than not, the challenges we face navigating the world, to release our respective potential, are hidden behind a Soldier-On attitude. Regardless, not one of us is free of some ‘abnormality’ during our time on earth.
Let’s think back to my mum and that crystal bowl:
Exclusion, maturity, or rules.
This all happens to be front-of-mind for me right now, because we’re on the disheartening side of an election characterised by more divisive ideas about race and class equity than any in my remembered history. At the same time, across the ‘ditch’, Australians have voted down a referendum to allow a modicum of indigenous peoples’ autonomy. I’m thinking about this because of those things; but I also know elections and decisions, worldwide, are only getting more and more divisive so there’s nothing especially topical about this problem.
What this does mean, however, is it’s increasingly vital we understand how division works in the minds of people.
Not all punch bowls are the same.
If you happen to be in some minority or otherwise systemically-disadvantaged group—especially if you have some valid claim to reparations or investment or status—of those three of my Mum’s Options, the easiest way to crush you is to simply exclude you and lock your uniqueness away.
Politicians and other elites might previously have done this by literally wiping you out (see: colonisation, eugenics, genocide); but, in our ‘civilised’ democracies, it’s more common to do it by calling to the wider population for “equality” or “shared culture” or “merit”. See—like that wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs—for a repressed culture or minority who are disproportionately imprisoned, underpaid, or unwell, presenting them as ‘normal’ is not much different from ignoring them.
When these sorts of politicians talk about “equality”, what they are saying is: “The person in the wheelchair should climb the stairs like the rest of us!”
But the crystal punch bowl is actually nice.
The thing is, if you lock away things like minority culture, behind a bland veil of normality—like my mum might have chosen to lock away that special crystal bowl—no one really benefits. Sure, those with existing power might pay a small price for greater equity but, over time, it’s invariably a price worth paying. We can be assured of this because, outside any little temporal bubble, there is no such thing as ‘normal’, and we hurt ourselves by pretending there is. If we aren’t born into some disadvantage or unique need, some of it will still invariably catch up with us eventually.
This is the truth that guides ideas like MLK’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, and Matthew’s “The meek will inherit the earth.”
Fortunately, there are those other two options. We can teach people about these minority cultures and alternative ways of navigating the world, and expand their minds until they embrace and respect the specialness, and see the opportunity that investment in, and involvement from, these minorities represent.
Or, we can make some rules.
It seems to me that, certainly when it comes to accessibility in the USA, the rules approach can be a great start. The advantage they have is, while they imposed laws around civil rights and, more recently, accessibility, the rules of implementation are largely unwritten, because they are policed by the threat of expensive legal action, making them less at risk of polarised debate than, for example, explicit law might otherwise need to be.
Here in Aotearoa, the flaccid discourse out of our election suggests, mostly, an attempt to take some other route via slogans and crowd-pleasing giveaways; all set against the myth of a “great struggle” for the minds of a small but loud group of Facebook-loitering and Talkback-enchanted people who, as likely as not, didn’t even bother to vote anyway.
Of course, at the scale of a population, both education and rules tend to favour the status quo. So the ideal approach is a bit of both. You plant ambitious values around respect and diversity, and don’t stop reminding people about the reality of their own fragility. As ideas like these grow in the wider population, they’re picked up by advocates who gain the kind of access to turn them from values into rules. And, with rules and time, we get a brighter and more colourful “normal”.
Many countries were founded using documents that laid out remarkably progressive rules, well before their populations understood them, in the hope that, eventually, citizens would grow mature enough to appreciate their full benefits for their own good.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal
It might seem like we’re going through a rough time with all this at the moment. It might seem there’s a disproportionate number of people fighting to hang onto a world that they believe privileges them by keeping the ‘crystal punch bowls’ securely locked in the cupboard. Those of us trying to direct a better future face a daily barrage—on social media especially—that makes it feel like we’re accelerating back 40 or more years, to times when difference and diversity was viewed behind glass or in pictures, and certainly not heard from!
But, don’t lose hope. We’re getting there. More and more of the people I speak to enjoy the wheelchair ramps, the indigenous placenames and greetings, the exciting food choices, the novelty and joy of exposure to diverse viewpoints, ideas, culture, and people, the energy of progressive movement, the new shapes and colours and sounds and visions.
It is in an appreciation of fragility that we always find the best of humanity. There are a lot of loud and seemingly-powerful people trying to lock it away right now. So, in the absence of enlightened rule-making, our only task is to keep patiently explaining why fragility is valuable and, in time, our fellow humans will grow to respect it for themselves.
-T
Excellent post, Tim.
There's nothing like a trip to somewhere else if you are open to alternative ideas and approaches. The usefulness of rules to ensure better behaviour until it becomes normalise and accepted is sensible (and it's interesting to be reminded of examples from history).
Maybe rules ensuring fundamental access, rights, and opportunities for minorities, like those with physical issues (each and every one of us at some point in our lives) will enable us to engage with others so we are more likely to understand the advantages of what we might once have considered special (and undeserved) access or treatment. It's not a zero sum game. It's a win-win that advances the standing in the game for all players (and maybe we should find replacements for Monopoly and Risk).