Diversity has been weaponized.

Our need to “Identify” is killing us.

Who I identify as, is likely to piss off someone. It seems these days everyone has a beef with some group, ethnicity, religion, region… We’re dog people or cat people, country folk or city dwellers, east side or west side…

And we really do like our identities. So much so that we lead with them, I am a woman,She/Her, mom, white, American from California, Southern California to be exact, not one of those Northern Cali people.

We pride ourselves on our uniqueness, yet we desperately desire to be in a group, especially a cool, accepted group.  Those of us who can claim it, sometimes like to use our minority status as a weapon or a curse. And sometimes those who aren’t a minority, enjoy being “on top” way too much, or they lament that they are under attack because of the minorities speaking up and out.

I get that up until recently, many people couldn’t even share their true identities out of fear and shame. It’s awesome that they can, for the most part, exclaim who they are loud and proud. I’ve always been a “You do you boo” kind of person.  I wasn’t raised with any strong attachment to an identity in terms of ethnicity, religion or even political party and I’ve always believed that people should be able to exist however they choose, within reason and respectfully. If someone’s identity rubs me the wrong way, I just tell myself “That’s a YOU problem Betsy, get over it” and move on with my life. We have bigger fish to fry as they say.

I wonder, are we headed towards total isolation and separation because we identify so much that we separate ourselves from those who don’t identify like us?

Humans have had for centuries an “us or Them” mentality, we are competitive against each other and often divided by how we Identify. We are currently fighting multiple wars over or identities. People are actually killing each other over the idea that their identity is righteous and those that are dying are not.

All this death and destruction over stories that we have told ourselves about “who we are”. Which are basically all made up. No, really, everything about our identities is made up.

Made up and then re-written based on whoever won the last battle. All we seem to be doing is battling each other because someone wrote a story that said “We are better than them”, so we must either convert them to be like us or kill them. That’s basically what’s happening.

Divide and conquer, as old an adage as Julius Caesar, probably before. It makes perfect sense, get them to fight each other in small battles and they will be too busy to fight anything else.

And that is exactly what is happening right now. We are relentless in our divisiveness. People will even battle over a baseball team. We have gone utterly mad over our differences, so frightened and afraid of anything or anyone that doesn’t “identify” like us, that we are quite literally killing each other over even the smallest of differences.

And until we stop, sadly it’s possible we may never recover from this downward spiritless we are in.

We must realize that regardless of our differences, we are, in fact all connected, that our survival relies entirely on our ability to unite.

This sounds so cliché, yet it’s the most truest of all things. As cheesy as it sounds to say love conquers all… really it does, and we better get to it.

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