A couple of important rhetorical questions.
Well not sure if they’re rhetorical or not, but they’re not meant to be answered out loud, more meant to think what answers you might have and why.
- What do you do when you catch someone doing what you think is both wrong and based in bigotry, and sie turns out to have a disability that caused whatever action is bothering you, to the point where it’s clear bias is not at work at all, let alone bigotry?
- With disability in particular: How do you handle it when someone seems to be interfering with someone’s access, and it turns out that they are merely ensuring their own access to whatever is going on, and that the problem is not one of them being wrong, but rather their access needs being in complete conflict?
- Can you be friends with, or even be civil with, someone who disagrees with a value you hold dear?
I was going to write a lot to deal with this. In fact, I’d been going to write two posts, one dealing with the first two questions, the other (and more important) dealing with the last one. But when I tried to write the last one, my computer ate it during a crash. And when I went to write the others, I got hopelessly sidetracked. So I’m just putting the questions out there as food for thought.
The first two really deal with how people handle complex situations in a context where we really, really want it to be simple, to be able to point a finger at one person and say “This person is wrong, and that other person is right.” A very common reaction is to sweep under the rug any complexities, and refuse to acknowledge them in any way.
And the last one deals with how ideology can interfere with forming authentic and varied human connections. And whether diversity of thought and opinion is a valuable thing or a nuisance or problem. And whether it’s more important who a person is or what they believe. And how we treat and view people we disagree with on things that are important to us. And that’s the one that really deserves an entire post, and got a long, thoughtful post, until my entire computer froze and deleted everything. Someday I might try to rewrite it, because this topic is extremely important to me.
But for now, they’re just questions. Not “I want an answer to this from you” questions, but internal questions. (Is that a thing? Is there a word for that? I know the term rhetorical questions but that doesn’t sound quite right here. It’s just the only term I know for questions that aren’t meant to be answered aloud.)