See Through The Eyes of Another, Listen With Their Ears
– By Ed Kociela –
The epitome of selfishness is the mistaken notion that the only thoughts, feelings, and meaningful judgments are those that come from within ourselves.
That’s why I plan to follow a bill introduced to the Utah State Legislature by Sen. Jani Iwamoto, D-Salt Lake City, and another by Rep. Elizabeth Weight, D-West Valley City.
The Iwamoto bill would create a process to change the names of landmarks in the state that are deemed offensive by indigenous people. The task would be monumental because it would require cooperation from tribes, local governments, Utah’s Division of Indian Affairs, and the federal government. According to a report by Fox-13 in Salt Lake City, there are more than 60 places in the state that include offensive words – the most common being a racial and sexual slur for a woman – in their names.
The Weight bill would push schools to remove mascots and nicknames that are offensive to indigenous people, akin to what recently went down in Cedar City when Cedar High’s nickname was changed to the Reds.
All of this would require a lot of red-tape to be cut and a substantial cultural change, but the effort would be worthwhile. Besides, if an NFL franchise can be persuaded to change its nickname because it was a hurtful slur to indigenous people, the State of Utah, much less popular, and certainly much less powerful, can do likewise.
The problem comes when people say, “What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t offend me.”
The solution is to realize that it is not about you. It is about people who are hurt, demeaned, stereotyped by these nicknames. You probably never noticed that hurt or embarrassment because, well, you figured since it didn’t bother you, it was all harmless and shouldn’t bother somebody else. But it isn’t harmless. We should be considerate of other people and pride ourselves on who we are, where we come from.
I come from Polish-Italian stock. There are plenty of derogatory terms for both sides of my ancestry, lots of hurtful comments made in some misplaced attempt at humor. We’re not all dumb, and we are not all gangsters, and I found the so-called jokes in that vein rude, ignorant, and hurtful. It may not have mattered to others, but it mattered to me, just as the crude slurs used in naming some of Utah’s landmarks are hurtful to the indigenous people.
“If someone called me a ‘squaw,’ I would be highly offended,” Tamra Borchardt-Slayton, chairwoman of the Piute Tribe of Utah, told Fox 13 News. “It’s a derogatory name for Native American women. At this time, it has no place to be so freely used when we know it’s such an offensive name.”
We’ve been beaten around the head and neck with the conservative bleats condemning what they term as political correctness. They claim it is watering us down, making us over-cautious, restricting our expressions.
The thing is, political correctness is a representation of respect for one another, being sensitive to others, being polite, understanding that the feelings of others are just as important as our own. If you don’t get it, I feel sorry for you.
If certain words are offensive to someone, if they are hurtful, unkind, or misrepresentative, then the only reason to use them is to be mean, spiteful, aggressive, dismissive, and rude. Don’t we have enough of that in our world already? Hopefully, we will soon sweep some of that away when we clean house in Washington D.C. on Jan. 20. But, really, despite the poor example we have had, we are ultimately responsible for our own behavior. In fact, we should have learned by observation how crude, juvenile, ignorant such behavior is and how it does nothing to salve the human condition. I truly hate bringing the current president into the discussion because, well, like so many others, I suffer from Trump-Fatigue and will be happy enough to be rid of him; the sooner, the better. I don’t care if he goes to jail, sets down roots in Florida, or hightails it to Kiev; I’m done with him. His words and actions have given license to the epidemic of bad behavior in the United States. The rise in misogyny, disrespect for people of color, anger, and lack of tolerance for those with opposing viewpoints, the disregard for the truth.
What I truly want, what I pray for nightly just before my head hits the pillow, what I yearn for in my heart is the erasure of such behavior and a turn that sends us into the arms of love and peace rather than to the armory. My guess is the best way to achieve that is on a one-to-one level, where we become instruments of change, embracing those people and ideas that may be foreign to us.
Some will claim they are blameless because that is the way they were raised. I call B.S. on that one because I, too, come from a time and place where ethnic slurs and stereotypes were how we related to each other, how we referred to each other. Along the way, I learned how wrong that is. But, to learn, you must first open yourself up to life, explore the limits. You’ll find that it can be exhilarating to live out there on-the-edge. You will also learn that it can be dangerous to live out there on the edge because it can be a precipitous fall, but one from which you can usually recover.
But, to get there, you must first pass through many doors to obtain a greater understanding of the universe, to fly straight and true into the headwinds and soar to heights where such things as color and boundaries and limits melt away from our Earth view. It’s a spiritual pilgrimage where the tithing is paid with benevolence instead of silver.
So, it is worth the time to look with the eyes of another and listen with their ears.
You just might surprise yourself.
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