Relationships between people have always been interesting to me. I think that is why I enjoy reading fiction so much because avid readers are merely people watchers. Since we are all scientifically hard-wired the same way, it seems like human relationships and behavior would be standard and predictable. But there is one ingredient of Human Interaction that Science fails to take into account. The element of passion throws a wrench in everything.
I don’t necessarily mean romantic passion. I’m talking about our convictions, our beliefs, our interests. The more I think about it, the more I’ve realized that many of the significant conflicts and wars in the civilized world were created not because of our basic human needs like food and water (yes I realize there are many exceptions to this). Many conflicts have been brought about because of our passion as individuals or as groups of people.
It’s our passion for certain things that draw us together or push us apart, like magnets really. Finding out what people love can be a risky discovery. I figured this out in college with a beautiful boy from my Spanish class. I noticed him on the first day and slowly migrated until I was sitting behind him, forcing him to acknowledge my existence at least when our professor (who looked a lot like Mango from SNL) passed out papers. We became study partners, and one day he asked me to come to a party at his house. I was so excited and intrigued by the mystery of him because all I really knew was that he was an Anthropology major, he wore Chaco sandals on days that I thought were too cold for Chaco sandals, he liked The Shins (according to the patch on his messenger bag), he rode his bike to campus, and he drank his coffee black with two packets of Sugar in the Raw. I didn’t know anything about his passions. I figured them out pretty quickly when I got to his dingy apartment though. There was a set of Samurai swords on top of his television. I crossed my fingers and hoped they were his roommates. No such luck because he lived alone. Then after a couple keg stands, he busted out his Japanese throwing stars that he chucked into a makeshift dart-board that he painted on his wall. Okay, so he was eccentric and apparently didn’t need his deposit back. I could work with that. But then I noticed the literature on his coffee table: a hard-copy of Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right. I assumed and hoped the Coulter was for the sake of irony. After giving a num-chuck demonstration to his guests, the boy that was quickly becoming less and less beautiful came and sat with me on the couch. When I asked him about the Ann Coulter, his response floored me.
“Smart lady. I think she’ll be the first female president. Plus she’s hot.” I looked into his deadpan face and waited for him to smile, laugh, pantomime barfing …something…anything. But then I realized what was happening.
He was absolutely serious.
(Were people who liked Ann Coulter allowed to buy Chacos? Were they allowed to become Anthropology majors?)
His passions made him completely alien to me. They pulled the rug out from underneath my expectations. Until I learned about the things that he was interested in, he was a person to me, a fellow human being that I could relate to. But after that experience at his house, something had changed. I distanced myself from him for a little while because when I looked at him or talked to him, all I saw was Japanese throwing stars, samurai swords, and Ann Coulter. Learning about his passions had completely effaced all sense of common ground that we once shared. When I realized this, I was able to overcome my prejudice and focus on the things that we had in common. We both appreciated our professor Mango’s affinity for coral colored blouses that allowed his chest hair to peek-a-boo through. We both loved dipping our scones into our coffee. We both loved music and old black-and-white films. There was enough common ground for us to stand on, and I was able to maintain a good friendship with him throughout college.
This idea of repellent passion really stuck with me over the years. I was repulsed by this person because of a few of his interests. Surface level passions can create problems on their own, but when you start dealing with the passions that are deep within us, these problems can escalate exponentially. I’m talking about the ideas that are at the basis of our existences. Politics, morality, religion, creation. These are the polarizing passions that make us strangers to one another. These are the passions that cause violence, terrorism, wars. These are the passions that make it more difficult and sometimes impossible for us to establish or re-establish common ground. These are the passions that make us hate.
I think it was Terry Jones (the crazy Qur’an burning minister in Florida with the awesome facial hair) that reminded me about all of this. Extremism seems to be the side-effect of allowing our passion to take over. We allow it to polarize us to the point where we can no longer see the ground to find common ground. If we’ve reached that stage, we’re also at risk of ending up at the opposite pole without realizing it; we end up becoming the very thing that we were repulsed by to begin with (i.e. killing people in the name of God, blowing up abortion clinics to protest murder, speaking out against jihad by burning religious texts). Passion, no matter how much it defines our existence, should never cause us to lose sight of our humanity because it is our shared human experience that will always exist as common ground…if we let it.
All this made me realize what I’m the most passionate about. I passionately believe that people should be less passionate. Or at least just keep their passions closer to the (common) ground.
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