“Looking in the mirror thinking I can’t believe what I’ve
become. Swore I was gonna be someone. And growing up everyone always does. We
sell our dreams and our potential, to escape through that buzz. Just keep me up,
keep me up.”
Yesterday I got the opportunity to visit Tivoli with my
festival friends. I was excited to get out of Rome and spend some time in a
different area of Italy, one that is a little less tourist-centric and crazy. I
was not disappointed. Tivoli was beautiful—the parts of it that I saw were
thick with waterfalls, beautiful caves, amazing scenery, and green. So much
green trees starkly contrasting with the beautiful blue sky. The power of the
waterfalls overwhelmed me throughout the day as I realize that these caves,
these hills, these valleys were all a result of the waterfall. The beautiful
Sirens Grotto was a result of a devastating flood way back in the day. As I’m
sitting there enjoying the view and thinking about life I read the sign and it
tells me that, that the flood was a hugely damaging moment in history and it
makes me wonder how something so beautiful and good can be the result of
something so awful and bad.
A constant
trickle of water from a waterfall, from a faucet, from a stream, has the
power—when combined with time—to completely alter the landscape around it.
Something so small with the patience and stubbornness to keep existing will
change the way the world looks around you. Sometimes this happens and results
in beauty, like the grottos and waterfalls at Tivoli, but other times it
results in ugliness and decay.
This makes me think about the clichéd concept introduced by
Ms. Niemi in my Advanced Placement Language course in high school: man’s
inhumanity to man. I often ask myself how people can continue to live and treat
others in the ways they do, whether it’s racism, gender bias, homophobia, or
simply close-mindedness and a lack of empathy. How can these people not see
that those they judge are people too, that just because someone is gay does not
make them a lesser being. It happens everywhere, on the global stage of
cultural genocide, the national stage of homophobic marriage laws, and on the
personal stage of judgment and stereotyped treatment of strangers. And yet why,
why does this have to happen?
Because that’s the way it is and that’s the way it always
has happened.
That’s always what I hear. “Things like this just happen
when you get a group of people together,” or “Yeah, that’ll happen you just
have to ignore it,” or whatever weak excuse blaming something external for a
personal bias and the unwillingness to take responsibility for your actions.
If we keep telling ourselves that it’s okay to treat each
other like this, that it is okay to clique up and bash each other simply
because that is what always happens, then it will never stop and we will never
change! Don’t tell me that I’m naïve, that I just want everyone to like me,
that I don’t understand how people work. I am very aware of how people “work,”
one does not bartend for as long as I have without learning about people. One
does not sit and watch as much as I have in different settings, comparing the
actions of people at the bar, in the pool hall, and at the casino to the people
in college, the professors, and the musicians on stage, without drawing
connections and learning more about people in general.
The lame excuse of letting things continue to happen because
they always have is not good enough for me anymore. We are killing the world
with our pollution, we are killing each other with our close-mindedness and
lack of empathy, and we are killing our selves by blaming everyone else instead
of taking responsibility for our prejudices and preconceptions. We fear that
which we don’t understand and in order to avoid that uneasiness at the unknown
we simply place everyone into neat little boxes in our minds. It’s a mechanism
of self-defense. Nobody wants to admit that it is fear that drives their
actions, but I think that is a big part of it. We are afraid of that which we
don’t know, we don’t understand something and it makes us angry because it
shows us our weakness. Lack of comprehension means that we don’t know
everything, and not knowing everything is terrifying for some people because if
you admit that you don’t know something you can easily begin to question the
things that you think you already know. Descartes started this struggle as he
tried to find his one clear and distinct perception. We fear that a slippery
slope of doubt and despair will result when we begin to question ourselves, so
instead we pretend to know things we don’t for the safety and comfort it brings
us.
But it does not need to be that way. We can change the way
we approach each other. We can alter our excuses and take responsibility for
our actions. We can teach our children to do the same, or our friends, or even
our friend’s children. We can be kind to strangers and open to new ideas. We
can quit being so self-centered and let others live their own lives. We can
learn to work together, even if we don’t like each other. We can put a tiny
pebble at the beginning of the river and let the new trickle form a completely
different waterfall.
We can slow down our lives and open up our minds. We can
find creative solutions to our problems. We can change the world.
