Being human

Last week I had the privilege to participate in the IU interdisciplinary graduate conference, “Consent: Terms of Agreement.” I was part of an undergraduate panel along with two other English students, and we all presented papers loosely related to one another.

After we had finished and were taking questions, one of the graduate students listening dropped a bomb.

She looked at all of us, and in a more long-winded, academic fashion, asked what we think “being human” means. It was cliché, it was scary, it was one of the worst questions I’ve ever been asked.

My answer was less than hopeful.

I told her that “being human” doesn’t hold much weight these days. We don’t care about our own inherent humanity, much less that of others.

In the middle of our tech and media fetishism where pop stars, actresses and housewives are splayed coked out in front of us so often, there’s just no way that we think of the word “human” anymore.

Human isn’t a label we assign to others or even ourselves. Instead, we’re too wrapped up in any other label that we can think of before turning to the one that we all share.

I’m a Midwestern college student much more than I’m a human.

And this leads to a progression of bullying and other problems — not because it’s right or natural, but because we force ourselves to differentiate ourselves from others.

There’s no way that we’d rather be a different label than our own, because even a disenfranchised label gives you some feeling of righteousness.

We can say Madonna looks like Freddie Krueger without makeup on dozens of online forums because she’s not a “human.”

But the incidents go much further than celebrity culture.

Recently the Indiana Daily Student has seen an influx of rape coverage. Gun control debates due to mass killings aren’t in the distant past.

As I’m writing this and simultaneously looking at Twitter, a headline from the Huffington Post popped up saying “Man shot in the head over double-parking spat.”

There’s a pretty clear and present detrimental effect of not thinking about humanity anymore.

Violence is easier when it’s not a human double-parking a car.

While pointing fingers rarely helps, I’m willing to say that this is brought on because of the Internet.

Rarely can we separate the online and face-to-face world. We stare at people’s Facebook profiles so often that the person becomes dehumanized — we solely know them as a conglomeration of photos and likes.

I’m not saying the Internet is tearing us apart, but I do think our integration of it into society has become highly misguided and destructive.

We should return to a point where the equalizing term “human” actually meant something.

So take a chance and label yourself as a human. People will look at you strangely and think you’re some kind of over-baked hippie leftover a lot of times, but stick with it and maybe you can make things a bit less awful.

­— sjostrow@indiana.edu