In a Time of Micro-Identities
IN A TIME OF MICRO-IDENTITIES
At my Unitarian Universalist Society
no one is Jane Doe or Jack Spratt anymore!
A person being introduced or referenced for their
political, social or spiritual wisdom, their positive
impact on business, industry, education or community,
inter-faith connectivity or even their potential for
simple friendship and warmth, must be presented and
pre-validated by their ethnicity and race, their religion,
place of origin, their sexual irregularity, behavioral
irregularities, and any number of special pronouns or nouns
that have multiplied like weeds after a soaking late spring
rain or like non-native species of flora or fauna,
imported to address problems both real and imagined,
that have become prolific and invasive, pervasive and
problematic in unintended ways, like the popular new
sport called “daring us to get it wrong”….
These micro identifications give the person being
presented an unnecessary social asterisk that divides our
collective focus, fogging up the intended message, diluting
the joy of engagement, perhaps rendering inconsequential the
reason they are even there!
They are no longer simply folks but a type, a brand, perhaps
another public admonition to check our social attitudes, maybe
scold ourselves a little, and it makes me irritated rather than
appreciative, jaded rather than enthusiastic, somehow
cornered rather than free, a little wary of presenter and
presented, more weary of division, classification and the
perpetually annoying tactics of moral correctitude!
My pronouns, as you can see, are he, him and his, as normal
as water and oxygen in our planet’s biosphere, but more
important are my aspirational adjectives: open, giving and loving,
which admittedly, I’ve discovered, are subject to tidal fluctuations,
my diurnal disposition reaching out and pulling back. But this
disclosure not-withstanding, let the person and the message speak
for themselves like the sun speaks of light and the moon,
like my wife, speaks subtly in phases about sunlight at night!
Let our penchant for insight and moral validity allow us
to determine if speaker and word bring us clarity and truth,
encourages our efforts to find ourselves in each other in this
reckless adventure we call humankind!
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