Irrational power of fearing ‘other’

City of Quartz – LA

After pulling together a group of admired friends and family reading a specific book – City of Quartz, by Mike Davis – and watching, listening to some current events, my response to the book has changed.

At first, I expressed my angst while reading that I had hard time accepting humans could be so collectively mean and selfish. The book brought out some of the worst race, economic, social class, and business vs labor examples from So. California. A paradise for those who were white and of means. I found it hard to read, and often could only absorb small doses to prevent despair about the human condition. The meanness of people disturbed me.

I shared some thoughts with close friend (who lived in So CA during the 80’s). His insight was very helpful to motivate my completion of the book. He described his experience and remembered many of the events described in the book. He ended with:

… the history books are written by the victors with little balance given to other perspectives.   Mike Davis is bringing additional perspective, and for that I am appreciative.   But his perspective comes through to me as myopic and similarly unbalanced.   Nevertheless, it adds another useful piece of the overall puzzle.

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Florida ‘heat’ law

An article in Grist about Florida law protecting people from the increasing hot weather – those people who either by choice (athletes) or by necessity (manual laborers) – brought another perspective that follows what I read in City of Quartz. The FL law all started because high school athlete died in the heat

The legislators heeded her call and passed the Zachary Martin Actin her son’s honor just two months later. Since then, no student athlete has died from heat stroke in Florida, which now ranks highest in the country for its school sports safety provisions. 

Grist

A sensible human would infer that those same heat protections would be applied to those who work outside as well, right?

Two years after Martin’s death in Fort Myers, a Haitian farmworker in his 40s named Clovis Excellent died from heat stroke at a farm just north in Bradenton. He had been working for five hours, pulling stakes from tomato beds in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, investigated his death and found that, given the intensity of the work, the temperatures he was exposed to were unsafe without regular breaks in the shade. But Utopia Farms II, like many farms in the state, did not require its workers to take breaks, no matter the heat. 

At least seven other outdoor workers died from heat illness in Florida in the two years between Martin’s and Excellent’s deaths, according to federal fatality records. During that time, labor advocates pushed lawmakers to establish heat-illness protections for Florida’s 2 million outdoor workers. These measures included rest breaks, shade, and water, as well as heat-illness first-aid training. 

But those efforts failed. More worker heat-safety bills have been filed in Florida than any other state, but none has made it past a single committee hearing.

Grist

I guess not. At least not in FL where manual laborers have few if any protections it seems, and a legislature that is very comfortable with that status quo.

‘Other’

I also recently read a speech by Steven Spielberg – if he wrote it himself, my admiration is very high. While obviously within the context of his foundation and objective of the speech, he made one of the most brilliant observations with simple language about the ‘other’. I copied from a transcript – MSN has a video.

For me …

Regardless of your color, race, language, social status or any other human trait one wishes to use to separate one from another to create an ‘other’ … we are all of the same heritage, we all share the same planet, and we all are humans, right? Yet, marketing, social media, and other modern communication methods leverage ‘other’ to create and amplify fear. Fear of the other, fear of missing out, fear of whatever people convert into the boogey man.

Fear is an old motivator and has out-grown its biological usefulness as human culture evolution leap-frogged biology.

The power of the ‘other’ is something to constantly watch for, push back against and avoid in our own thought patterns. Learning new motivators that build up, create common purpose and enrich the earth seem much more appropriate and timely for our current cultural evolutionary locale.

As Pere Dumas made famous, “All for one, one for all”!