Tag: victimhood

It’s Not a Disability, It’s a Genetic Variance

Over the last few years, I started realizing how much trouble we were having communicating with one another.  Less so for close friends and family.  Much more so when it comes to discussing ideologies with strangers.  Having failed at so many of these conversations, I may have learned something.  If we want to have more meaningful conversations, we need to do a better job of being honest with one another.  And that includes using the most accurate language available to us.

I hear the word disability tossed around a fair bit.  There now seems to be a disability for everything.  It’s like if you’re anything other than the ‘perfect’ human blueprint, you are somehow lesser.  And this is your disability.

Fuck that.

I read something interesting a few months ago about the victim mentality.  Someone was asked why it had gained in popularity and what made it attractive.  The answer was rather simple:  it was an easy way to be powerful.  The traditional route to power was through hard work and success, and it usually took  years.  In a society that celebrates and protects victims, why invest the time and effort into building yourself up through accountability and responsibility when you could get the same result through claiming your victimhood?  Why put in the long hours and make the hard decisions when you could look for ways in which you’ve been marginalized and call foul?

Disabled?  Why even try?  Why would you want to overcome your challenges?  Why would you want to try and find your gift?  Why not tell the world that you got a raw deal and that it’s their responsibility to make it up to you?

Because of Stephen Hawking and everyone like him.

Put him in a pro football game and I’ll show you someone who is appears severely disabled.  Place him within an academic environment where he can research, study, and share his knowledge… I’ll show you one of the most gifted individuals of the last century.  It’s only a disability when you apply yourself to the wrong task.  That means it’s not a disability, it’s a misalignment.  Your genetic variance needs to be aligned with the right task for you to do what you do best.  I would imagine Gronk would be about as successful at teaching theoretical physics to a group of PhDs as Hawking would be at catching an end-zone pass.

I think it’s about time we start making an effort to understand the situation for what it is.  There are plenty of illnesses which are real.  There are all kinds of foreign substances which can be introduced to your body which will mess your shit up.  That’s where it’s important to understand how to heal the body and bring it back to a sustainable equilibrium.  But I can’t help but think that this is very different from most if not all physical or cognitive ‘disabilities’.  Those aren’t disabilities, those are genetic variances.

When I try to think about myself from the perspective of disability, I can see plenty that’s wrong with me.  I get pretty bad pollen allergies every year.  My vision isn’t perfect.  I qualify as dyslexic.  I have a series of lingering sports injuries including chronic lower back pain and metal in my arm.  I have a heavily deviated septum.  My sense of smell sucks.  I binge eat.  And etc. And etc. And etc.  And it’s not like I’m unaware of them.  I’m working on improving the ones I can, and not stressed about the rest.

It’s funny, I’m thinking back to when I grew up and it the was kind of neighborhood where nobody was short on disadvantages.  Everyone was aware of what was making their lives hard.  We didn’t complain or expect someone else to change it though, we just assumed the deck was stacked against us.  What we would do was use that a measure of whose success was worth celebrating.  It wasn’t about who had the greatest accomplishment, it was about who did the most with the least.  I can’t help but be grateful that I was raised with that perspective.

When I think about who I am and what I’ve been given, with the perspective I have today… I see something pretty cool.  All things considered, I think I got a pretty good roll of the genetic dice.  But like anyone else, it’s a mixed bag.  The way my brain is wired allows me to do certain thing exceptionally well while it struggles with others.  Dyslexic?  Why?  Because my brain is wired to do things differently than someone else’s?  And what if I can do these things better than the average person?  Is it a disability?  Who’s to say that my unique genetic variance doesn’t simultaneously display symptoms of dyslexia while allowing my mind to do all kinds of other cool things that others struggle with

We are all our own deviation from the human blueprint.  Each variation of that blueprint comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.  And those advantages and disadvantages wills shift depending on circumstance.  The best thing we can do for ourselves is understand where we have the potential to be exceptional at and apply ourselves to the best of our abilities.   The best thing we can do as a society is to support the discovery of what makes us different, and then to support the pursuit of being our absolute best at it.  Through this, I can see a happier, more productive world.

Whatever it is that you are, there is something you do better than anyone else. If you spend your time doing that, you are not disabled, you are gifted.

The Popularization of Victimhood

I grew up in a low income neighborhood where things were probably a little rougher than average.  It was mostly immigrant families who came here with very little, in search of better opportunities.  In neighborhoods like these, opportunities were scarce so you learned to fight for every opportunity and every advantage.  Sometimes that meant finding ways to sneak two lunches at school.  Sometimes it meant stealing part of the lunch from the person who got up to go to the bathroom.  Everyone was always being tested – if you left an opening, you got hit.

Sounds like a rough place, but it wasn’t without ethics.  Those with disabilities were always off limits, and often befriended by most popular kids.  If someone targeted them, they were immediately protected, and often by the toughest kids.  Others were simply known for being too nice to be picked on, and were supported for taking the high road.  The rest of us.. were fair game.

The appeal of victimhood doesn’t resonate with me and recounting through my childhood, I might I understand why.  When you grow up in an environment where just about everyone is starting at a disadvantage, working your ass off to get to the status quo is the status quo.  Drawing attention to our circumstances for the sake of sympathy or outside intervention just isn’t where we choose to put our energy.  Instead, we work hard in school, become productive members of society, and give back to the community so that we can solve this problem for future generations.  Today, our community center has the largest food security program in the city, one of the best basketball programs in the region (NBA Cares just redid our gym), and gets 75% of it’s funding through fundraising – largely from community alumni.  This is how I learned to deal with disadvantage.

The other remarkable thing that happens in this neighborhood is that we produce great people.  We’re not without our bad eggs, but generally speaking, we’re polite, kindhearted and well intentioned.  Even the friendships made there are more like family than friends now.  We were terrible to each other, but only when it didn’t matter.  When it mattered, we would fight tooth and nail for each other.  Perhaps it left me with a different perspective on when things mattered and when they didn’t.

This is why I struggle to relate to what appears to be a developing culture of victims.  Where I might see an opportunity to redeem myself, it’s as if they see an opportunity to draw attention to themselves.  It’s often under the premise of ‘raising awareness’ which seems well-intentioned but it’s a somewhat incomplete strategy on its own.  There’s a wide gap between being aware of something and understanding it.  Fortunately for all of us, awareness generates dialogue and dialogue helps to develop and circulate good ideas which ultimately help us understand what we’re actually dealing with and how to make progress.  The problem though, is that the solution is to popularize redemption.

Redemption isn’t just inspiring, it’s informative.  It says yes, you can get dealt a shitty hand and still come out on top – here’s proof.  It says look at what I just did, take what you can and apply it to your situation.  The better the story, the more viral that information becomes.  Some of the greatest stories in human history are based in redemption, but you can’t have redemption or all that fantastic personal growth that comes with it without adverse circumstances.  I can’t help but think that with the right perspective, adversity can be seen as positive.  It’s when we suffer that we learn the most about ourselves and the universe around us.  Adversity is that fuel that pushes us forward in the most meaningful of ways.  For the record, this is all from personal experience.

The problem with popularizing victimhood is that it’s encouraging the wrong behavior.  It’s like celebrating the loss rather than celebrating the win.  It’s also creating a sense of pessimism where people are spending more time looking for ways in which they’re being harmed than they are looking for ways in which they’re being loved.  And by the time we’ve all identified as a victim of something, what have we accomplished?  Do we still make a conscious effort to sympathize for a victim when everyone’s a victim?  Do we continue to use the word victim, both for someone who was killed in a mass shooting and for someone who was whistled at on the street?  Where I grew up, the word victim was often reserved for a drug overdose or a homicide, the kind of event you couldn’t overcome.  Now it’s a hashtag, part of how we identify, and indicative of social virtue.

Identity politics, where your social status and implied virtue is linked to your level of victimhood.  A racial minority? 1 point.  Female? 1 point.  Gay? 1 point.  Disabled? 1 point.  Straight white male? – 3 points.  I have to admit, there is some irony in how the popularization of victimhood has systematically marginalized straight white males.

As much hate as they get, this isn’t as much of a white guy thing as it is an old people thing.  They want control because they’re afraid of what will happen if they’re not in control.  They’re intolerant because they’re afraid they don’t know how to deal with change.  In a world of uncertainty, they’re afraid and are desperately trying to keep things the same.  In a world of change, we’re quickly taking over.

Let’s focus less on what we don’t have, and more on what we’re going to create.