Remembering Our Humanity

Remembering Our Humanity

By Molly Miller

For Richard Jordan’s Psychology Class;

Psychology of Adjustment 1611 01

April 29, 2007

What is the meaning to life? Why are we on this earth? What do we seek to accomplish? Where do we want to end up going? How do we want to get there? These questions are very common in today’s society. In a land of plenty, Americans seek to find a grander purpose to their meager existence. They want to know what they are supposed to be doing with their life, and how to get to the end fully satisfied.

In a lifetime, mankind finds he wants three things above all else; to grow within himself, to be accepted by those he loves, and to be remembered. These are goals that we all think we know how to get; yet we are traveling in the opposite direction!

While trying to get what we want most, we end up dehumanizing ourselves through the paradox of progress, analysis of outside personality traits, and the death system. These three things distract us from our most basic wants!

These basic wants first start out when we are very young. In a stage of life defined by testing boundaries, we want to learn. Throughout our childhood and teen years, we search for identity and personal growth. We want to be the best that we can be and we want to be ourselves at the same time. We look everywhere to define who we are, but we are most influenced by technology. This is the age of the internet, the television, advanced medical procedures and everything digital! We are advancing at, almost, an alarming rate, yet through this incline of technological inventions, humanity dwindles.

The growth that we seek, as humans, cannot be found in the progression of technology. This is the Paradox of Progress. This paradox starts with the question; “Are we progressing?” and brings that subject to another more pressing and complex question. Through answering the question with the thought that we as humans, and more specifically Americans, are moving forward with regards to technology and medicine, but we are taking huge steps in a backward direction when it comes to relationships, social and personal issues. So now the question becomes not ARE we progressing, but is this progression worth its cost?

Depression, disrespect towards one another, anger, greed, impurity, humanity. All of these things are what we pay for the ability to sit down at the computer and push a few buttons. Instead of developing human contact, face to face, we let our computers talk. Instead of the contentment built when we are really close to someone, we separate ourselves from them by placing a screen before our eyes and turning away from those closest to us. “Relationships almost don’t matter to them.” Lee Miller says, talking about those who seem to spend all their time surfing the internet. ( Miller) There seem to be a lot of these people; somewhere close to 1.114 billion (internet world stats).

These technology-addicts end up replacing each other by ignoring those around them and turning to CDs, iPods and computers as a way to ‘escape’ from those around them. They don’t do anything with each other anymore… they are too concerned with themselves that we don’t ‘have time’ for others. They start asking themselves, ‘what could others do so I don’t have to work so hard?’ and then they buy a bunch of technology to help them work less, therefore becoming lazy. And then it becomes all about them. They never reach out to help another and they don’t turn to each other to help either. When they have a question, they don’t ask someone, they go to Google it. When they have a free moment to themselves, they take endless surveys and repost bulletins on myspace without any thought, but they don’t think to call or visit each other to offer them a listening ear.

And then we get mad at each other… why doesn’t anyone notice? Doesn’t anybody care about me? We get stressed… we get tired and rebellious and it only drives us away from each other more.

And then we get to the matters of life and death. It’s all a power struggle for ‘humanity’ when it comes to medicine. We want to control who lives and who doesn’t. We want to develop ways to prove that a child isn’t a person until it takes its first breaths, or that we can solve any problem we want by injecting ourselves with needles. We can cure STDs, save lives and even prevent cervical cancer because ‘humans’ have that power. But we don’t realize that we create these problems in the first place and we already have a solution, we just have to realize it- and keep growing, because no matter how hard we try, we can not duplicate human life or replace those we love with machines or music.

As we grow, we find that our own personal growth is not enough. We must also have the skills to grow socially, gathering more and more friends. How we see each other becomes vital. There are two ways of seeing someone; through snap judgments, or by seeing their personality traits.

A personality trait is defined as a “durable disposition to behave in a particular way in a variety of situations.” This means that the behavior a person shows would follow through despite the situation. Unlike traits, Snap judgments are those quick little thoughts that pop into our head, on impulse, when we first see someone.

In a psychology class, this year, we were asked to describe a friend. A person raised her hand and started to list of traits of a friend of hers. She listed five traits and the first thing I noticed was that three of those five traits were negative. (Class) Why are humans so eager to point out faults in one another? Since when did this little habit come to such power that upon describing a friend, we describe not her qualities but her flaws?

In my theatre group, we are working on a style of acting called Comedia Dell’arte. It is an Italian comedy style which is also known as Comedy of Art or the Human Comedy. The characters in Comedia are many, but they each have their own weakness. Pantalone (the master) was greed, Arlechinno, Pantalone’s servant, pushed things too far, Dottore (the fat doctor who knows everything) was the need to be right always, and Capitano (the captain and protector) was a bully. Instantly, when I knew who those characters were, my mind associated them with people I knew who I see as having the same faults.

Instead of finding the qualities of my family and friends, I saw their flaws and put them in the same category as those Comedia characters whose whole personality is based on flaws. But the worst part is that I cannot find myself in the characters, or maybe I can’t find the characters inside myself. I’m so captivated with finding flaws in others, that I can’t see my own flaws. I can’t see myself as a bully or as a know-it-all or as a greedy person.

And what happens when this happens? If I see myself as better then another person, I will trust myself more then the person whom I am comparing myself to. If I see another person as the faults in him/her I will be very reluctant to let him/her have any control over me and I will push him/her away.

This habit can only lead to fallouts. Soon snap judgments turn into assumptions, which turn into misunderstandings and that becomes fights. “‘We could be such good friends if only he were this, that or the other’ is nonsense. It comes from the habit which seems now to be ingrained in human nature of persistently blaming the other man…” (Call)

Blame is the key word here. Too often we blame others for our mistakes, especially our friends. After all, they are really more likely to be wrong then we are, right? They could lie easier then we could, right? They could harm us with less reluctance, right? This leads us to conclude that we cannot trust our friends and we must always be in control of our friendship. Is this why we put others down? So we can be in control? Do we see other’s flaw so we have an excuse to be in control? So we can say to ourselves “See all their flaws? You are so much more capable of handling such a situation as this…”

One thing we don’t see, but I have been trying to learn, is that when we try to gain control of everyone, we aren’t in control of ourselves. We don’t see that we are betraying one another because we’re so engulfed in ourselves. We are loosing control of who we are, each time we say something against each other. If we are friends, then we wouldn’t say such things about each other. Did we mean to say such a thing or was it just a moment of lost control of our tongue? If we aren’t in control of ourselves, why do we think we can control others?

And if we did know what we were saying, we aren’t a true friend. Do we know if we are true friends or not? And if we do not know if we are friends, what other things are we uncertain on? If we do not know who we are, how can we think we know each other and so say such things? If I do not know what flaws are inside me, how can I know what flaws are in others? If I cannot see Comedia in me, how can I say the characters are in others? How can I be the judge? The truth is, I can’t. No one can.

We can only see ourselves fully, and throughout our lives this becomes more and more evident. We eventually grow and, whether we end up a loner or a social butterfly, we end up moving on with our lives. Yet, something gnaws at us. Suddenly, being that person who found herself no longer does not matter, nor does being right, or being the one in control. At this point, we want to be remembered. We want to know that if we disappeared, or died, someone would care. We try to imagine what it would be like; our funeral. Who would come? Who would cry? How would our loved ones handle the situation?

The Death System is a collection of rituals and procedures used by a culture to handle death. In America, these rituals include wearing all black, viewing the body one last time to say farewell and standing by the loved one’s grave while a pastor, or other religious authority, tells stories about the deceased.

While these rituals may be comforting to some, the uniformity they carry can distract from remembering the loved one as an individual. I found this especially true when I was in South Dakota for the funeral of my Grandmother, Viola.

As I observed the many rituals associated with death, I took special note of the viewing of her body and the funeral/burial. My aunt, Viola’s daughter, took the news the hardest and she wanted to do a lot of the rituals. She was the one who organized all the events, took personal responsibility for contacting everyone and took the longest moment placing her flower on the casket.

There were flowers, lots of flowers. Why do we have flowers? What comfort could they possibly bring? After all, they are only flowers, they wilt within days. They too die. They add color for a while, a little bit of pleasant aroma, but they die. Wouldn’t it be better to take comfort in something that didn’t die? But then, everything dies… so what comfort could we ever gather from anything? Yet, it is comforting to some to take a simple flower and place it upon the casket, like they are leaving a part of themselves with their loved one.

I hated the casket. The moment I saw it, I hated it. I hated how it was so small and so… uniform… each of those boxes were the same size, the same design, the same everything. It was sad really. They were made without thought, without care, just to place some dead body that they didn’t know into it so that person could be buried and put out of sight. Once the lid is closed, that’s it. Into the ground they go, so alone, so void of feeling.

Even the person inside the casket is turned into a ritual. They are cleaned, sewn into a uniform pose and placed in the casket. When I saw my grandmother in the casket, all I could think of was ‘that’s not her. What have they done to her? She’s not here.’ I heard my aunt tell my grandpa after she got back from doing my grandma’s hair, “She looks beautiful, dad. She really does.” I smiled because I wanted her to be beautiful. But when I saw her, she looked like a doll with a stone face. There was nothing beautiful in her, because her beauty was her strength. She fought long and hard and with beauty and strength. Lying in her casket, there was none of that. She was gone. She left only a shell that could not even compare with her. It wasn’t her; it was some strange doll in its box. Like a collectible Barbie doll.

The ceremonies themselves were very ritualistic. We said prayers, we sang songs, we told stories, and at the center of it all was the casket, filled with stuff that we put in it. One of my cousins put a cross inside with my grandma’s body; another drew a picture and put it inside. My sister and I wrote poems and put them inside the box. But I knew she would never get to read them, so I don’t know why I did it. Even her body would never touch the paper or see the picture or admire the cross.

And when the family read my poem, they cried. Everyone cried. I’ve now seen people cry whom I’d never be able to imagine crying. My father, grandfather, countless aunts and uncles and cousins… My aunt, who took it so hard, at one time just sat upon my grandmother’s bed, holding the pink pillow that held Viola’s head as she died, and cried in my grandfather’s arms. He held her close, of course, but his presence wasn’t enough to fill the presence that was gone. My little brother cried, his head in his hand, at the funeral. My father cried for his mother, my mother cried for her mother-in-law. I was asked if I had cried yet. I said no. It was then that crying just became another ritual. As if crying would help me feel better, as if it would comfort me and it was something that *had* to be done. Well, it was a ritual I never took part in.

When I’m really sad about something, my reaction naturally is to grow silent and tired. I grow weary and watchful. But unless I’m extremely tired, I don’t cry. I will bawl like a fool at the littlest things in life, but the big things, like death, I face with dry eyes. I’m sure if I had witnessed my grandmother’s death, I would cry. If I had seen her before the rituals, I wouldn’t have felt like crying was a ritual. I would have wept for her, and for the farewell.

Seeing my grandmother in a casket wasn’t farewell. You see, she was gone, so how could I say goodbye? She couldn’t hear me, she couldn’t see me, and she didn’t even know I was there. For all that was in me, I couldn’t figure out why the funeral was even taking place at all!

Looking back on it, I remember thinking “Why am I wearing black and purple? Grandma’s favorite color was red…” And now I know. My aunt’s favorite color was purple. The funeral was not intended to say goodbye to my Grandmother at all, but to comfort my aunt, and all the other members of my family, as they grieved. That included me. Only, those rituals did not help me one bit. They made me feel awkward and deceptive, for not sending Vi off with what she would have wanted.

I suppose it didn’t matter to her anyway, since she was dead, but it mattered to me that we hadn’t treated her as anything but a tool for comfort. Like our comfort was more important then her individualism.

How will we be remembered? Will our loved ones see how much we’ve grown by looking out at the technology we used? Will they see how much we loved them by looking at the judgments we made of them? Will they remember or forget us while they mourn? Certainly they would rather look at how we lived our lives, how we showed them that we grew and that we loved! The Paradox of Progress, Snap Judgments, and the Death System all distract us from where we want to go… where we want to end up.

After all, we can’t replace those we love with machines, become the judge over them or even force them to remember us without loosing our compassion and humanity. And that is what matters most- what we should be striving for.

Works Cited:

Call, Annie Payson. How To Live Quietly. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1914.

Internet World Stats. “INTERNET USAGE STATISTICS – The Big Picture.” March 19, 2007 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Miller, Lee A. “Technology vs. Relationships; Embrace change or get out of the way.” May 01, 2005.