Us=Them

About fifteen years ago at a shop in Philadelphia, I found a tiny lacquer pin with silver letters that pronounced "Us=Them." I picked it up instinctively and had it wrapped as a Christmas gift for our friend R., who happens to be gay. Though I didn't understand it at the time, it was an attempt to eliminate the dangerous mindset that separates us so neatly from each other or from The Other. Leny recently blogged about this "othering," this tendency to pull a "there-for-the-grace-of-God" number every time we think about--for example--the recent disaster.

Like many, I was disconcerted by the media's use of the 2-year-old Swedish boy separated from his family in Phuket. When some talking CNN head somberly proclaimed that "...he may very well become the face of this tragedy," I thought how the hell do you figure that?! And then, of course, there was the focus on the ordeal of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, who was also vacationing in Phuket. The fact that she graced the cover of the magazine in 2003 was repeated several times as if it were some sort of key fact in understanding the gravity of the situation. And that's the point where I sorta gave up on mainstream media.

But then Leny and her post came along, and I realized that in being annoyed with the coverage of these two particular stories, I was guilty of my own kind of othering. In fact, I'm guilty of that quite a bit (hi Republicans!). So with many thanks to Leny--and with apologies for the mangled writing and any lack of logic in this post--I'd just like to repeat...

...it's Us=Them.

Period.