Labels Aren't Just Used For Nutrition!

I have a Zen Calendar on my office desk that I bought at 5 and Below on a whim.  Zen is pretty cool, although much of it is a little too mystical for my liking.  This calendar occasionally has some Taoist words of wisdom as well though, so that makes up for it I guess.

Today’s wisdom was great: 

I love this.  And here’s why.  The world is an awfully complicated place, and yet we are constantly oversimplifying in just about everything we do.  It more commonly happens within our relationships with people, but let me step back and explain this from a very basic standpoint first.  You have a pen on your desk.  Anyone who is reading this is now visualizing a pen.  Does your pen have black or blue or red ink?  Is it a ballpoint pen or a gel pen or something else?  Does it have a rubber grip, or is it a cheap piece of plastic?  There are quite literally thousands of different styles for pens.  Yet they all are explained away with one word?

Now let’s think about people.  Let’s lump all the fat people together, and I can do this because I’m fat. =P  Now let’s use some logic (flawed logic, but logic nonetheless) and say that all fat people are lazy.  Well, we could be correct with this statement, but that's rather unlikely.  I’m probably the last person you could ever call lazy.  I jog two miles a day four times a week.  I try to write 5000 words a day.  I work from 8:30 to 5, which routinely involves solving technical puzzles and riddles that would boggle most people’s minds.  In the evenings I entertain a three-year old.  I may be lazy in journaling what I eat and following dietary guidelines, but does that make me lazy as a person?  And what exactly qualifies a person as being fat, anyway?  I most certainly am fat, obese by doctor’s standards, so I’m not counting myself in this.  But if someone is, say, six feet one inch tall and a hundred and ninety pounds—right on the border of being overweight according to a standard BMI chart, is he/she fat?  I could point you to thousands of athletes who are six foot one inch tall, weigh well over two-hundred pounds, and would never be considered fat.  Fatness, to me, is in the eye of the beholder.  It’s a label.  And it’s not a very nice one.

I’m not going to go on and on about how people bully others with labels here—I’ll save that for another time—but you get the picture.  Labels are so misleading.  Except maybe when it comes to relationships—if a person says he/she doesn’t want to label a relationship with terms like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or whatever, chances are that person is looking to dump you as soon as someone with nicer, ahem, labels comes along.  Labels mean EVERYTHING in relationships.  Am I right?

But labels are pervasive in our world.  Try reading a technical journal some time, especially one relating to a Microsoft product.  You’ll read about things such as Active Directory, Hyper-V, group policies, DNS, NAT, blah blah blah.  I’m really quite shocked to see immigrants who learn English as a second language (ESL) then jump into the IT field and become successful.  As if English isn’t hard enough to learn alone, they then have to master technical jargon.  Add in a programming language, which can be just as mystifying, and it’s just all that more impressive.  No wonder so many people complain about immigrants taking all of our jobs.  Far too many of us have too much difficulty mastering English alone, and we were even born here!

Of course, we live in a now, now, now and a me, me, me society, where most people want things done yesterday and often only worry about their own concerns.  When speaking to people like this, you can’t exactly use a hundred different words to describe something simple like a pen.  But you can think with an OPEN MIND.  When the reverse happens—when they talk to you about a pen, or a fat and lazy person—you can understand that their labels are simply that.  Labels.  Utterly inefficient words used to describe something that is clearly a thousand-fold more complex.

Eww...Look at that Guy's Tattoos!

Tattoos are great.  I can’t have any more due to religious reasons, but I love them nonetheless.  If I could, I’d have half sleeves and ink on my shoulders and back and everything.  That’s just me.  I know some people don’t much care for them.  My wife is always saying, “Oh yeah, it looks great now, but what happens when you are sixty?”  And my response to that is, “Well, when you are sixty, you get it touched up or redone or removed.”  And I know that’s not the most difficult thing in the world to do.  I had a tattoo removed once—10 sessions at $200 a pop to laser that thing off.  That was almost a decade ago though, and nowadays they are cheaper and require fewer treatments.  I know some guy that had one removed this past year for only a couple hundred bucks—only a little more than the tattoo itself cost.

Why am I talking about tattoos?  Because Trev Gearhart is the owner of Ice Serpent Piercings and Tattoos, a fictional tattoo shop in my new novel, Terminal Restraint.  Trev is a big guy, covered in body ink, with long hair and a big heart.  Not unlike many other tattoo shop owners and artists I know.  And people judge him.

When I wrote Terminal Restraint, my number one goal was to tell a compelling story that my readers would enjoy.  That’s my number one goal always, really.  But in the back of my mind, I had several subtle messages that I wanted to get across to my reader.  And one of them was acceptance.  Acceptance of those who are different from you.

I know what it’s like to be different.  On the outside, I’m a Caucasian male in his mid-thirties living in Small Town, USA.  There are probably a million others that look like me on the outside.  I’ve even seen a few Ryan Doppelgangers around my town.  Get to know me though, and you’ll find I’m not quite what you expected.  For one, I’m in a mixed-race marriage with a biracial son.  I’m also a Muslim.  And unfortunately, I’ve witnessed and experienced hate and discrimination firsthand.

I was actually at a restaurant one time when an employee loudly said to another, “Look at that Chinese girl with that white boy.  That’s not right.”  We complained, but of course that guy was still there the next time we visited.  Now THAT’S not right.

I can understand the concept behind why certain people hate.  People don’t like things that are different.  When a particular person, say a woman in her fifties with two grown children and a husband who is a business executive, sees a person in his teens or twenties or thirties covered with tattoos and piercings, she’ll become a little reserved and will probably judge that kid as a miscreant.  She doesn’t understand how someone can poke holes in themselves or cover themselves in permanent ink.  Perhaps she feels it’s not right for religious reasons.  Maybe she thinks that person is into drugs and rock music and devil worshipping.  Who knows?  Oh yeah, by the way, that’s Trev Gearhart from my novel: a tattooed guy who loves loud rock music and is a member of the Church of Satan.  No, really, that’s him.  Seriously.  A bit cliché?  Possibly, but all written for a good reason and worthwhile reason.

The town I live in is predominantly white.  And unfortunately, the only African Americans most people see are the arrested ones on the news who have drifted in from New York or New Jersey to peddle drugs.  Some people in this town actually raise their children to distrust black people.  Racism and hate and intolerance is horrible, but when you are raised to feel that way from the time you were born, it’s hard not be intolerant.

Take another issue: gay marriage.  I really struggle with the reasoning behind the opposition to it.  I know people say that it’s not what God wants, and the Bible says that homosexuality is a sin, and blah, blah, blah.  But didn’t the Pilgrims come to America to avoid religious persecution?  Isn’t the freedom of religion one of the many principles this country was founded on?  So yeah, you may not agree with gay marriage because of your religion, but what right do you have in telling someone else—who possibly/probably does not share your beliefs—what they can do and who they should be able to marry?  That, to me, seems like religious persecution.  And anyway, it’s not like two gay people getting married has ANY ADVERSE EFFECT ON YOU.  Their marriage is not going to make your taxes go up or the cost of gasoline to rise or anything else.  Yet so many people are against it.

Really, I don’t think people are against gay marriage.  I think those people are just against gays, but it’s not illegal to be gay—it’s just illegal still in some states for gays to marry.  Now THAT is intolerance.  THAT'S not right.

Everybody the world over is different, but people instantly judge others based on appearances.  People may see me and think I’m just some big white guy like them or their husband or father or brother.  And I get judged as that.  This guy won't care--he's just like me.  And then they’ll maybe talk bad about other cultures or religions or whatever right in front of me.  I once had a coworker send a company-wide email making fun of the way Chinese restaurant workers speak.  Naturally I reported her to HR.  I also had another coworker send an email out blasting Muslims and the US government for issuing an Islam postage stamp.  I reported her to HR as well.  Neither gave any thought to the fact that I’m not just some big white guy, that I’m married to an Asian and that we are Muslims.  THAT'S NOT RIGHT.

My new novel is about a half-Asian IT guy who, after having what is thought to be a Satanic black magic spell cast on him, is killed and comes back as an undead monster.  My characters are diverse.  I talk about Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, which is probably not what most people think it to be.  I write about rushing to unfounded and biased judgments.  It’s a book filled with intense action, but there is also a very clear message there: ACCEPT.

Do you accept those who are different from you?  Or do you judge them and instantly write them off?  Or worse yet, belittle them or utter hateful remarks when those people aren’t around?  If you’re one of the latter, I pity you.