Failure of imagination

I am a devout Mormon. I believe it, I live it, and I am in church on Sundays. In the Pacific Northwest, possibly as a reaction against all the hippies, it is common for church members to be politically conservative, though I am not. What I am getting at is that I frequently hear people whom I know to be very good people say horribly stupid and insensitive things.

I know this happens with other denominations too, and in other areas. I am not the most fun person to say something stupid around, so it could happen more too. And yes, some of them are not actually that good people, but for the ones who are, I really believe one issue is that their goodness limits their ability to imagine some kinds of badness.

For example, at one point there was some talk of kids these days, and that old chestnut was brought out about parents being too lenient, and how we were all spanked and turned out fine, but now everything is child abuse.

Yes, spanking was much more common when we were kids. I don't actually think that is the reason we turned out fine, but parents who were otherwise loving and nurturing who also spanked would not necessarily ruin a childhood.

That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as child abuse, and while they knew that on one level, I think there is also a failure to grasp that there are people who do not love and nurture their children like they will. When talking about a concept in the abstract, they imagine people like themselves, who are basically good.

I was thinking about this because of Stephen A Smith's apology, and especially Cari Champion's comments about his humanity and that wouldn't have been what he was trying to say. No, I still believe he really does believe that women provoke their abuse, and that his updated apology was still more about him and his good women than any changed understanding.

I do believe he is not likely to beat a woman, and so his coworkers can stand up for him -- he doesn't support domestic violence! However, maybe that is also why he finds it so easy to feel like the woman must have done something. He knows that Rice (and Mayweather and Chad Johnson) is a professional athlete with a powerful body who better know how to control his temper, but he still can't get away from wondering what she did.

Maybe Smith doesn't know what it is to have a bad temper that you have never learned to control because you get so much positive reinforcement, or you had it kind of controlled until the last concussion. He probably doesn't know what it is like to be a controlling abuser who knows how to spot vulnerable targets, isolate them, and put them through Hell, but that is something that happens. There are predators, and for a normal person, that is hard to imagine.

Perhaps it is a failure of empathy. It could be a scary thing to empathize with someone scary, but we don't even have to go there if we will allow ourselves to empathize with the victims by letting them talk. That's why it concerns me when there is so much focus on telling women to shut up.

And I know there are a lot of male victims of abuse, and I know there are a lot of attempts to silence minorities on the internet, though that seems to be especially women. I will probably spend more time on that, but the message for today is listen.

You do not know everything about the world or about everyone else's experience. You do not have to.

You do need to understand that you do not know it all, and you need to let other people have their own voice, like you get to have yours.

Listen.