Me vs. Culture: And the Victor Is....?

Last night I watched “The Help” for the first time. It was an experience I hope to never forget. The movie is set in the Deep South during the tense time period when Martin Luther King Jr. was publically defending his people and arranging peaceful marches. In Mississippi, the racial prejudices were some of most severe in the country. Black women worked as maids, but were treated like inferior beings and deserving of less in life than those who employed them. Most of the African American families needed other people to raise their own children because their employers paid them to raise their white children. These women would raise generations of white children, and many times were at the receiving end of harsh treatment from women they raised who had developed their parents’ prejudices.

One of the reasons this movie was so meaningful to me is because I tend to internalize events and time periods. What I mean is that I put myself in those situations and try to imagine what I would have been like, the kind of character I would have had, and how I would have been influenced by culture.

I think sometimes we say to ourselves, “How can people act this way? How can they have that kind of worldview? How can they treat another human being in such a fashion?”. In our society now, it is culturally acceptable that Caucasians and African Americans are equal. We should all be offered the same opportunities and liberties granted by the Constitution. But it wasn’t always that way.

Imagine for a moment that you were a teenager in the 1950-1960s era. The world was changing quickly, and the turbulence was at an all-time high with black rights at the forefront. Think about being a teenager and the peer pressures that surround a young person, all the choices that can be made which direct a person’s beliefs. If you have been raised to think that you can get a disease if you touch an African American or share the same bathroom with one, what then is going to be your view of that race? If you are surrounded by peers that mock and show disdain for a young person of a different race, if you are not firmly planted in a different belief, what will your natural inclination be? To follow suit and show your friends that you can be as “cool” as them!

It's frightening to think of the prejudices I'd have held  had I been carried downstream by culture's current. I’ve always assumed that I would be no different than those people and that I would have carried the same prejudices that were common of the culture.  Human nature’s habits are to blend with the crowd, to make one feel good by putting another down. We all want to be accepted, and we will do what we can to be accepted, even if it means hurting someone else in the process.

I want to thank God that He has opened my eyes to see this sickness in myself and this disease which all humanity carries. I think, without Him, I would be just the same. The thing that encourages me from watching that film is that there were people who stood up against racism. There were humans who saw something wrong with a person being treated like dirt just because they had a different lifestyle and a different skin color.

But what concerns me even more is the culture right now in which we live. I think it is easy to look back and point out the mistakes of previous generations and claim that we are so much better and that our generation will get it right! But it is much harder to closely examine our own culture and the things that we just accept because it is part of life and it’s what happens. I’m thinking specifically of abortion.

Now I know immediately that there are many who would roll their eyes at this point, but I don’t think that it can be over debated. But neither am I going to spend time on the arguments that everyone has debated continually. We all know which stance we hold and why. But this is what I do want to say. When I look at the horrendous things that humans have done to each other over the decades and centuries of living, I don’t think that I can be too careful to defend the life of another human being. If there was even a chance that a baby became a baby at the point of conception, I would do everything I could to protect what that baby could not protect by himself: his own life.

Once again, I know the debates. Women have a choice to do what they will with their own bodies. I know! There is a difference in human-hood and personhood. I know! My own personal choice would be to set aside what I know I can do with my own body to protect a life that couldn’t protect itself. And I know I’ve never been in the situation of having been raped, and I dare not speak for those who have been through the horrible trauma of having their own bodies and dignities stripped from them. The experience would be devastating. I pray that if I ever had to go through something like that, I could set aside my anger, hate, grief, and the utter destruction and allow beauty to be born through that situation. If pregnancy would come from that, I would want to be strong enough to carry out that pregnancy even if I chose to give up the baby.

I never want to point fingers at people for the choices that they would make in any situation, horrific or not. I simply want to share what I would hope to do if ever put in that place. I just imagine 50 or 60 years from now, a teenager growing up in a world where it’s commonplace to know that an abortion is murder. Maybe we learned something new or very revealing about being in the womb in the first trimester and the laws changed. I would hate to have people look back and say, “How could they have lived that way? Why was it even a debate? Why not just stand on the side of protecting human life?” There is no much hate and death in this world, and I never want to have watched it happen and pretended that it was ok, just because it was culturally acceptable. I want to stand for goodness and truth. I want my conscience to be clean. Humans have a capacity for great compassion and goodness, and yet, also for evil and hateful acts. May we not live mindlessly in our culture, but deeply consider how we can take a stand for humanity’s weak and forgotten ones.