Identifying a specific group of people to be regarded with respect and care is an approach to an issue akin to “preaching to the choir.” Those who already understand, appreciate, and embrace the concept of positive support toward a marginalized group don’t need to be reminded of their mistreatment and told they should not mistreat them.

Meanwhile, those who already harbour ill will to marginalized groups tend to respond with ill feelings toward the message while citing reasons why such a sentiment is exclusionary to them and their feelings. This is why “All Lives Matter” became a response to the message “Black Lives Matter.”

That black lives are snuffed out at rates which prominently indicate a social bias against them that results in a significant degree of avoidable victimization is irrelevant to them in this issue. Such people already feel victimized themselves, and providing positive attention toward other marginalized groups gives them the excuse to feel even more marginalized than they already do.

It may be true that they are not victimized to any additional degree by statistical contrast. However, a large part of their animosity is derived from feeling marginalized from society in general.

The marginalization they feel is universal. The extremes of income disparity we live with today universally exacerbate anxieties throughout the population. In contrast, only those who do not live with economic insecurity find some insulation from the challenges of daily living.

Encouraging people to develop respect for and care for others requires addressing the barriers preventing them from alienating others from a small and shrinking circle of safety in the face of an increasing array of reasons for insecurity.

Most people are already clear that when life is good for them and without survival issues predominating their concerns, it’s much easier to be open to strangers. Strangers are always viewed as a threat when life itself feels threatened. Accepting strangers without instinctively assuming they’re an additional threat to pile onto their activated fight-or-flight instinct is much easier when life isn’t under an omnipresent threat. Increased anxiety levels are a consequence of our economic disparity. Fixing that makes it easier for people to open themselves up to tribal outsiders naturally.

I remember experiencing directly how familiarity seemed to function like a cure for bigotry through a few simple words, “We don’t think of you as a Paki, Biker.”

Biker was a quiet and unassuming personality who worked hard and performed well within the McDonalds restaurant I worked in during my teenage years from 15 to 16. He was one of the gang who would join us in our “car parties” and was appointed as our designated booze-buyer. I don’t remember how old he was, but he passed inspection well enough to never run into any trouble buying alcohol for the rest of us.

In retrospect, I don’t think we pronounced his name correctly, but he never indicated that he minded it. I think it made him feel part of the crowd. I do remember feeling awkward whenever someone gave him that back-handed compliment with complete sincerity, “I don’t think of you as a Paki.”

I grew up in a predominantly blue-collar town with an economy primarily sustained by several sawmills and pulp mills in the area, situated at a significant crossroad between north and southern highway arteries. The average education of the town at the time was grade nine, and bigotry was so rampant it became invisible, but it was there for those who cared enough to pay attention.

Gay people were tolerated as long as it remained only speculative that a person was gay. The moment they were outed, however, they risked severe injury. No one wanted to think of people they liked as being gay, and so few would overlook the obvious to avoid feeling like they needed to do something about them.

The gay people I knew from school had their friends who accepted them as they were; whether or not they revealed their “status” was not a matter I was privy to, but I could tell and just kept my mouth shut and treated them like anyone else.

About ten years ago, an old high school “friend” looked me up, and we had coffee together while he brought me up to speed with gossip from school. One piece of news he had for me was that Lawrence had come out of the closet. He spoke those words while still expressing surprise, and my nonchalant response confused him. I quickly changed the topic before he could ask why I wasn’t surprised. I asked him about someone who had demonstrated some kindness to me as a bullied fat kid in school, and his response made me feel like we had travelled back in time, “Oh, she’s a slut.”

That meeting made me feel justified in completely cutting myself off from the people I grew up with because they hadn’t changed. I remember being invited to the first ten-year reunion from our high school by telephone. I was informed of someone who had committed suicide, and that made me feel sad for her. In the background, I could hear someone make a joke about swallowing a shotgun and that sent chills down my spine. I asked myself why I would want to travel to the toxic town I grew up wanting to escape it to endure entirely obnoxious people. I remember indicating that I might attend, but I wasn’t sure. I knew then that I didn’t want to go and haven’t been to any they may have held.

I had and still have no desire to surround myself with such a tone-deaf form of sociopathic toxicity. It doesn’t change within the individual once it’s set within their personality, mainly from their upbringing and early socialization experiences.

People don’t grow to respect and care for those groups they’ve spent a lifetime marginalizing. They only become more tolerant and less overtly abusive but can easily get triggered into being abusive if the conditions are ripe for it.

Living in hardship makes it easy for latent bigotries to surface. That’s why MAGAts are so easily riled up. They will never be convinced to respect and care for the people they’ve learned to hate unless they’re exposed to them in person and begin to think of those people they know as different from the bigoted image they have of that group within their mind.

That tone softening happens only when their lives are more manageable, not more complicated.

This is the very crux of our class warfare as people are weaponized against each other by the plutocrats in our midst who have stolen trillions from the working class and exacerbated their struggles. They further weaponize the undereducated by messaging designed to stoke hatred while pointing fingers of blame at the marginalized groups for their struggles.

The ownership class deliberately riles these people up to set them against their neighbours because that distracts us from their efforts to benefit themselves while further impoverishing the rest of us.

We may sincerely want to cultivate respect and care for each other as citizens, but we must approach the issue from a universal perspective. We must address the stressors serving as barriers to caring. Sadly, the solution appears more and more to require chaos to force a return to sanity.

“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution necessary.”

During this time of year and this “sacred” day when we are all called to regard each other as members of a family we call humanity, we can only hope that sanity will return without requiring the ritual blood sacrifices we’ve paid throughout history.

For what it’s worth, I hope your day today is filled with peace and contentment.

Temet Nosce

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora. For answers to additional questions, my profile can be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/“