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B The Author's avatar

Profound and beautifully said, Natasha. I especially enjoyed your juxtaposition between the less bloody conflicts (e.g. Mean Girls) and the horrors we're seeing play out in present day, because like you, I see the correlations between their basic mindsets, which ultimately leads to the dehumanization of our fellows. Which naturally leads to one's own ability to commit atrocities.

During my service in the military, I recall quite lucidly the sorts of pejoratives my contemporaries (and shamefully, myself) employed to cover the large swathes of people who might have possibly fulfilled the roll of our "enemy". It wasn't until my departure from that uniformed career, that I came to realize the unconscious psychological tactic of such pejoratives, which served to dehumanize these people, further enabling us to become the very monsters we thought we were fighting.

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Joyce Ragard's avatar

Thanks for writing this! It reminded me of this James Baldwin quote:

"The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive, and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it. All roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is."

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