Talking to Myself, #5: Lunch Tables

My introduction to politics was in the 6th grade. I had just spent 5 years more-or-less on social autopilot: too young to carve out an identity, and frankly too young to even know what identity was. Then again, not too long before that, I had just been introduced to toilet paper, so I like to think I was doing my best.

But then elementary school ended, and I was changing venues. Painfully in line with the social caterpillar-nowhere-near-butterfly that I was, I was blissfully unaware of the inevitable social grouping dilemma that was coming down the pike:

What lunch table was I going to sit at?

No child is prepared for this most unsettling of situations. And the healthy dollop of anxiety with which I have approached everything in life since I had the audacity to require my mother slice her body open so that I could take my inaugural flight on planet Earth…..well, it was a bit of an issue.

I had to make several immediate calculations: Where were my friends from last year? Who did they decide to sit with? Could I tolerate these people? Could they tolerate me? If not, then what? To this day, I shudder at the thought.

That primordial lunch table decision followed me all the way through to senior year of high school. I sat with the same people and hung out with the same people. We had developed a cursory sense of identity. We talked trash about the other tables, held our table in highest regard, and wouldn’t dare sit anywhere else.

Our shared thoughts, values, mannerisms, and style choices (or very much lack thereof) filled us with a unified sense of pride. We were us. We had no desire to be them.

In fact, those thoughts, values, mannerisms, and style choices were necessarily influenced by the fact that we were not them; and the fact that we were not them was necessarily influenced by those shared points of identity.

I had my team and I was loyal to it. While I’d like to look back and believe it was due to some perceived sense of shared ideology or worldview, I stayed on that team because that team recognized me, accepted me, and — most of all — viewed me as someone worthy of its time.

And so maybe the question worth asking is did my beliefs inform the group I picked or did the group I picked inform my beliefs? In other words, how much of my current worldview is dependent on that earliest of decisions? How much of my current worldview is dependent on an ever-present reptilian need for social acceptance?

I suspect it’s more dependent than I’m comfortable admitting.

What then do we make of the suffocating level of group pride afoot in the modern state of U.S. politics? We’ve decided that “we” are the good people and “they” are the bad people. “We” know what we’re talking about and “they” do not. It’s an aggressively reductive prosecutorial approach to human life that takes into account exactly zero percent of what forms a person in the most fundamental of ways.

How people arrive at a worldview matters at least as much as the worldview itself. And, if we’re going to attack opposing worldviews as if they exist outside of the continuum of experience from which they are birthed, then all we’re participating in is a form of revenge porn that serves only to provide us a desperate immediate gratification.

There are no conversations, just duels. Fights between warring factions. Lunch table politics. Your friends amping you up, egging you on. And here you come, the table’s elected representative du jour, fighting for your honor and the honor of your fellow tablers.

At what point are we going to be embarrassed by this?

Sure, there are very real distinctions that divide people. And those distinctions can be significantly destructive and we have to address them if we are ever going to make this place better. But, when has cutting people down to the bone marrow ever made them more receptive to new ideas? Not a tip top environment for reflection if you ask me.

We have nationally embraced rudeness as method. We get off on being rude. Acting like the self-appointed smartest person in the room is the new American pastime. Even my fellow Lefties — no one likes a self-righteous asshole. Talking down to blue collar people just makes your working-class-hero shtick a form of intellectual fetishism.

That said, you know what else we learned sitting at lunch tables for 18 years? They were just tables. And they only mattered because a social situation was constructed without our consent that forced us to segregate, vilify, and develop a fucked up pride complex out of the most fundamental need for self preservation.

This is politics today. But, we’re not in high school anymore. So, I kindly ask thee: spare me.