"Other" is a powerful weapon. It's a cruel weapon.
"Other" allows us to divide the world into two groups: people who are like us, and people who aren't like us.
We can then marginalize the "other" group. We can ignore them. We can resent them. We can fear them, and hate them, whoever they are. When you "other" someone, you can feel justified in mistreating them, excluding them, denying them respect, denying them basic humanity. You can feel justified in bullying them, hurting them or casting them out.
"Othering" someone lets you assign a label to them, to make them easier to identify because of their "otherness." Often, the label acquires a pejorative connotation, if it didn't have one to start with. "Others" become "extremists," "terrorists," "criminals," "undesirables."
It's easy to generalize about an entire population of "others" based on the public actions of one or more bad actors. But it's just as easy to justify or rationalize the bad actors in our own group, the population of people like us, and to say "the rest of us aren't like that." That's called the Fundamental Attribution Error. More about that in another post.
If we succeed in getting rid of all the "others," if we end up with a population that is just like us, then we end up in a bland, boring world. We end up with a plate of plain, white rice. Every day. For every meal. BORING.
I used to attend a regular weekly meeting (high priests group; if you know you know) where everyone thought the same thoughts and said the same things, all the time, week after week. Saying something different was, um, not well received. I finally started finding excuses to skip the meetings. I would rather pull the veins out of my forearm with a fork than sit through that again.
The fact that we are not all the same should make us stronger and more united, not weaker and less united. Granite is made of four different minerals, none of them as strong in their pure form as when they are combined in granite.
Our differences are what make life interesting. A smarter man than me once sang:
Rejoicing in the differences, there's no one just like me
Yet as different as we are, we're still the same.
We need to recognize that we are all children of the same God. He loves us equally, and therefore we should love each other equally. When we truly understand this, the "other" designations melt away. Rather than building walls, or fences, or detention/isolation centers, we should be building bridges. Remember, we are stronger together.
