I stood in a hallway, the walls lined with what might have been black tarp, or else simply black trash bags, themselves spray-painted with just about every slur and insult I had ever heard (and a couple I had never heard before) ... and I just couldn't take it seriously. It was laughably cliche; many of the insults were of the sort no one but the misguided parties prone to using them could ever read or hear and not shake their head at, smiling condescendingly. A few of the words, I felt, were outright stretches, almost to the breaking point. Insults directed at sorority girls set (seemingly) on par with words of such negative meaning that they have been all but driven from our vocabularies? Really? I could blame this first portion of the Tunnel of Oppression for my attitude towards the rest of it, but I know that would just be shifting the blame. Honestly, I simply wasn't moved.
Perhaps I'm just jaded, but I long ago outgrew the concept of taming the animal that is man. We're an intelligent animal, I believe that. Caring, empathetic, and willing to lend aid to those we truly care about. But take as past our individuality, I believe, and you end up with a stupid, brutish, violent race. As a species, we never outgrew our sense of the "tribe," even when all but the most apparent tribal divisions fell away. We simply found new ones to replace them. Taste in music, social cliques, favorite sports teams ... as a species, we insist on dividing ourselves up and, in doing so, attempting to assert the dominance of our tribe over all others.
I do not believe this to be an excuse for our behavior. Quite the contrary. I am not so jaded that I looked upon the images and stories in the Tunnel of Oppression that followed the laughably cliche hallway without some sense of empathy, some sense of sorrow. But it was an intellectual sorrow; I certainly felt the crimes depicted in the pictures lining those garbage bag walls were wrong - but I knew they were wrong more than I felt they were wrong. Laughter and jokes did fade upon entry into the Tunnel proper, to be replaced with an equal amount of empathy, but let's be honest: there wasn't a lot there to inspire much of either.
Mankind needs to change, I know this. But I also know it isn't likely to ever happen. We are tribal by nature - we care about ourselves and those closest to us, if we care at all. Those rare individuals who truly care about their fellow man (I know such a girl, and consider myself far beneath her). Because of this, we can be moved to action, but only by those causes that are closest to us.
A black person looks upon pictures of hangings and sees a crime against their people. I look on them and see a crime against a people, perpetrated by a bunch of really stupid people. I honestly couldn't tell you when I stopped believing such stupid people could be changed, but I know, at some point in my young life, I did.
I'm not heartless. No one is heartless, but most people are misguided. You want to move them, you have to get in there and scare the hell out of them. But trying to convince a person to rise above all the anger and hate and injustice in the world at once is damn near impossible. Lynchings, racism, children pressed into war, broken childhoods ... who's to say which of these crimes mankind commits against itself is any worse than any other? They're not, they're all equally as bad. And the individual in many - hopefully most - of us would certainly like to see them all fade into history ... but the human in us isn't likely to move against any crime that doesn't affect our tribe.
It's nice to think we, as a species, could move above this. It's just not particularly likely, as far as I'm concerned. And I certainly don't think that a handful of pictures and video, slung up across trash bags alongside typo-filled quotes, is gonna do a damn thing. People will line up, look at it, shake their heads in sadness and act like they're better than the foolish people responsible for these crimes. Then, tomorrow, they'll go out with their friends, forget the Tunnel ever happened. Joke about it, for lack of a better way to deal with the anger and sadness that one cannot deny was present in those pictures. And they'll look on some group of people passing by, a handful of humans from another tribe, and they'll throw insults and jokes and try to put themselves above them. Hopefully, it won't be over anything as stupid and senseless as racial stereotypes, but really: isn't it pretty much the same thing to make fun of some Emo kid for wearing too-tight jeans?
And they'll keep doing it, we'll all keep doing it. We can't escape it, and we can't overcome it, not as species. Not until we're scared out of it, not until we afraid enough to put it behind us. I wish things were different, but I know they're not. More importantly, even as I type this, there's the sense of sadness in feeling they're not. Because, as individuals, we may be terrified well passed the point where we feel the need to change. As a species, we're simply nowhere near it.
Call me jaded, but at this point, I worry that such a level of fear could only possibly come in the face of total destruction.
It certainly didn't come from that Tunnel.
