Lines

            From our artistic beginnings, we learned how to draw lines. Straight lines, crooked lines, black lines, white lines. And we still do— except today, we use them among people. We divide and group individuals in our mind, and even if we don’t overtly stereotype, we all hold certain assumptions and jump to conclusions about others based on certain characteristics like their race, dialect, appearance, etc.

Even men as great as George Clooney are offenders:

            And it’s more than that. The consequences of how we think about individuals, are far reaching— they determine how we act towards them and ultimately who they are relative to ourselves. And often times we don’t recognize this, but these thoughts ultimately end up as a self fulfilling prophecy.

Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say Timmy is a fourth grader and accidentally bumped into a fifth grader in the lunch line. Now Timmy thinks that this big bad fifth grader is going to retaliate because that’s what fifth graders do. So he turns around and gives the fifth grader a good taste of his fist to land the first hit, which obviously angers the older child who returns the favor, a punch he wouldn’t have thrown had Timmy not preempted a nonexistent fight.

Now, Timmy constructed the threat that this individual posed, based off of his assumption that retaliation would be inevitable, actually leading to what he feared. Now it sounds ridiculous, but it happens more often that you’d think. And on a global scale— countries do this too, and often the conflict involves more than a few scratches and bruises, they risk war.

Let’s think about the enemies that our country has. The first that comes to mind are terrorists— a threat that’s driven our nation to an economic quagmire and military overstretch. But are they really everything that we make them out to be, do they really meet the constructed image that we've portrayed them as?

Look at Iraq. We invaded to prevent the development and usage of Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorist groups, which by the way we still haven’t found today. And our military presence has actually incited more opposition in the region. Christopher Layne, a national editor of the Atlantic, wrote in his study, “Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived” that

“The US presence on the ground in the Middle East also incites terrorists to attack American interests…‘what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a…goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland’

(It can be found here)

An even better example is the Cold war. Construction of threats is literally the reason that an arms race began. Our country made the Soviets an “other”, assuming that they would develop arms to harm the good people of the United States, in turn justifying their development of nuclear weapons, which just incited further justification for the Soviets to develop their weapons of which we pointed to and said we had to keep increasing our arsenal for. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

The moral of the story is, be careful how you think and how you group and “otherwise” different groups of people, because it’s not just a thought, it affects much, much, more.