Remember the movie, Jeremiah Johnson? Well really, who could forget a movie starring Robert Redford (is he a beautiful man or what)? One of the things I recall is the huge animal furs he wore to keep warm.
I also recall animal rights activists throwing buckets of red paint (some reports said it was animal blood, others said paint) on people wearing fur coats. I would guess they felt they were doing the right thing. It looked like it wandered over to revenge, but only they could say for certain. One commenter on Quora wondered whether pouring buckets of crude oil over people wearing polyester or other synthetics or throwing pesticide on those who wear cotton wasn’t a similar act. My my my. That escalated quickly!
It’s the game we play. We all do it. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say we get sucked into it. Let’s call it the game of Either/Or. It’s a wonderful, magical game where you must choose to stand for only one side and absolutely be against the other. Those who hear you say something can automatically smack an invisible label on you without your consent or knowledge, and you can do the same to them. The devil loves this game because everybody loses.
It goes like this: If you like a speedboat ride, you don’t care about the clarity of the lake you zoom around on, and if you hate to see oil floating on the water, you must be an aging Hippie. If you support the timber industry, you don’t care about forests or the cute little animals who call the forest their home, but if you’re concerned about said animals, you have no comprehension of what’s necessary for the business and don’t appreciate the chair you’re sitting on. If you support some big businesses, you’re heartless when it comes to the environment and the little guy, and if you are a small-business supporter you miss the great contributions big businesses provide. On and on we go until someone gets hungry and asks, “But what if you like both animals and a good meal?”
We’re not quite at the questioning part yet in the current game. The game we play of late is a simplified version. If you spin the spinner and it lands on support your local police, you’re a racist; or a certain skin color, you’re a racist; and if it lands on a certain sex, you’re a sexist; but if you don’t know which sex you are – then you get a free turn. And another favorite – if you think everyone needs what some call a vaccination and others call the newest experimental gene therapy, you get a ‘don’t care about freedom’ label or, conversely, if you don’t believe everyone should be vaccinated with it, you get a trifecta of labels: anti-vax and think there isn’t a troublesome virus among us and you don’t care about others. And if you question the rules, you get a conspiracy theorist label and lose a turn. This is a multi-purpose label that can earn the person who gives it the “I’m smarter than you” award which can be traded back and forth among the players.
There’s an extended version of the game involving masks, lockdowns, and accusations, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll stick with the simplified version. There’s also a companion game called Truth or Die which can be played with either the simplified or extended version of Either/Or. This is a game that can be played by people who don’t even know they’re playing it, which leads to greater overall intensity of play for those who do.
When we arrive at a place of understanding that most of us really do want very similar things, we will stop playing the game. But the final rule of the game that brings it to a halt is twofold: unfolding the card we each get at the beginning of the game marked ‘God-given rights’ and rejecting fear and extending grace and forgiveness. And we’re not there yet.