“there’s the real mystery: the life of others” — Adam Zagajewski, poet

Can we justifiably condemn anyone for their ideas, their prejudices, their loyalties?

Each of us is born into particular circumstances that vary widely in terms of financial security, educational opportunities, and safety from bodily and psychological harm. Furthermore, we are dumped into a dog-eat-dog, individualistic, society hell-bent on the accumulation of money, which is held to be the highest standard of success and happiness. “Progress,” a meaningless word when considered a virtue in itself, usually means guaranteeing a greater accumulation of wealth and advantages for the “winners,” as well as further destruction of the environment.

Our circumstances alone, though, do not necessarily determine our views and decisions. Our minds are fluid and unpredictable.

It gets harder and harder to express myself as I write this! Nuances sprout up in my mind. Complexities. My own often spurious assumptions. And I am as guilty as anyone, even when unconsciously, of that dangerous practice of labeling people? We were taught when we were very young, as early as the first grade, to rank ourselves and others; Max is “dumb” because he is in reading group “Pixies.” Bella must be “smart” because she is in reading group “Elves.”

We learn to judge and form biases and then to clutch at them as though our self-created identities depended on them. Unfortunately, they do. Figuring out our place in a group is essential to primates. It assures us a certain status and some protection from predation, whether from tigers or from an amoral profit-oriented media. However, we also have the capacity to reason, to discern, and to look into our own minds.

I know I couldn’t be convinced, short of being placed on the rack or at the stake, to recant my beliefs. The identity I created for myself is vital to me, though it is, according to my own belief system, merely the result of a random arrangement of genes and dependent on where and to whom I was born. When something, however, is as crucial as the looming election, I must dare examine my beliefs once again to understand why I so fear a particular outcome.

These identities we created are being used against us this election year by ambitious and insidiously devious politicians. We are being manipulated to imagine ourselves at war with each other, conjuring “the other side” as an enemy. In truth, we are the same: vulnerable human animals struggling to maintain a sense of ourselves in an increasingly chaotic world.

Protect yourselves. Protect the country. Protect the earth. Question your prejudices and opinions over and over and try to understand where they came from before you vote. It is a difficult task but we do not need to remain as children, hoping to be “Elves” instead of “Pixies” in order to feel like “winners.” The gift of reason can give us, at least, partial insight into the forces of our ancient emotions and learned behaviors.

Nor is it unusual that those earliest labels assigned to us, when we were innocently marching in orderly lines to our reading groups, have turned out to be terribly wrong. “Pixies” were never “dumb” nor were the “Elves” necessarily the achievers we imagined them to be. I am sure that the labels we toss carelessly at each other today are no more reliable predictions of the complicated feelings and reasons we will each bear to the voting booth in November.

Margot Fleck is an artist who lives in Northfield.