Inclusivity versus Exclusivity
Our parents and our politicians and our public figures all tell us that inclusion is important. As an older brother, I can tell you I heard, “Include your brother,” enough times as a kid that I didn't have to even think about it anymore before my teens. Z was coming along whether my friends wanted him to or not. And, believe me, they didn't.
It is, though, right? Inclusion? Important? Including people who might currently be excluded from things is how we think we're going to save the world. And probably that's right? But it's most certainly not universally true that everyone should be included in everything.
This sounds like it's going to be an argument in favor of racism or something equally evil, even to my eyes. A guy has to be careful to say only what he means. So, let's start with definitions.
What does include mean? “From Latin inclusionem, 'a shutting up, confinement.'” And from there, exclude is a “shutting-out, non-inclusion”. Seems pretty obvious in the way we use the words. That's going to make me have to actually explain my thoughts, rather than them being explicit in the words themselves.
Democratization has taught us over the course of, whatever, the last 300 years or so that everyone should be included at all costs. Because exclusion leads to the kind of things we all know and think are evil in the world. You prevent women and non-whites, for instance, from voting – whatever your reasons – and you start to think maybe women and non-whites aren't human, and you start doing terrible things to them with the justification of the law.
But is exclusion always the wrong choice?
Well, in politics we in the US seem to think it's pretty reasonable that convicted felons should be excluded from the political landscape. We seem to think that because they made a choice to do something felonious – which doesn't necessarily even mean it was a heinous crime; isn't smashing a mailbox with a baseball bat a felony? - they are unfit to contribute to the social decision-making. And we know that's the wrong worldview. Conservative political strategists have targeted expanding felonious crimes across the country for decade, have worked to install legislation that fills our courts with felony charges – to exclude wide swathes of the country from voting.
Because if those people voted, they would vote for the wrong people, right?
Isn't that kind of the whole Democratic game? There's a right person to vote for and a wrong one, and it's up to you to make sure everyone around you votes for the right one? That's definitely what social media have given us the opportunity to act on. So by golly we sure do. We regulate the thoughts of people we don't know, shouting at them and calling them mean names and worse over things which we aren't even actually included in!
These Boomer white males who hang out on Twitter to scream obscenities at young Liberals, who themselves are happy to shout right back, aren't actually involved in their party politics. In fact, their party is happy to use and exclude them – from the actual decision-making, and definitely from the benefits therefrom.
But should they – should any men – be included in the conversation of what to do with “women's bodies”? Repruductive Rights, as it were?
I really don't know. Because there's always that conversation of What of the father when the mother doesn't want to keep the child? The answer is usually Tough Titty, Little Kitty, it's not your body carrying the child to term. On a side note to this, my life has presented me with a lot of historical American examples of doctors going rogue and doing “illegal” abortion operations. Those doctors have all been men. Has there been a “Mad Doctor of Spokane” who was a woman? Or were women not performing illegal operations because they weren't allowed to be medical doctors?
Were they not allowed to be practicing doctors? Or did too few women not want to deal with the “boys club” of professional medicine?
See, I wonder about that. And we're talking about exclusivity and inclusivity, so let's explore this deeply sexist topic. Were women “only nurses” because they didn't want to be doctors? Or, like how there are, indeed male nurses now, no matter how much the worldview that men are doctors are women are nurses persists, did too few women want to be doctors – or were the men really that aggressively exclusive?
I wonder, because in the modern world, the men are that aggressively exclusive, but women are more combative in regards to getting what they want from men. But, in that way, women are just acting like men. So I have to ask the question again: were women historically “mistreated” because they were mistreated, or because they were unwilling to play the game in the same way that men do?
You've probably noticed I love the NFL. As above, so below, right? The NFL is a Microcosm of the United States – as the US is a microcosm of the world's human population. I observe the game and the League in that way.
When you see a new offense or defense light up the League, it's because someone is willing to try something new that no one else has ever done before. The 4-6 defense, the West Coast Offense. And the only way to defeat it, because you have to try to win in the NFL – you can't just lose and keep your jobs – is to try things you weren't willing to try before.
Feminists remind me of fans of whatever team has been playing the Patriots lo the last two decades. Sometimes they win. Usually they lose. Always they complain that the playing field isn't fair, while their team does nothing to actually address the reasons they're consistently losing. Or the things they do to address them are wrong.
This is what it is to be a human.
Maybe if they were more inclusive, they would consider new, better ideas.
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