I am interested in the concept of tradition, particularly Starkville’s idea of traditional values and how these values can prove to be injurious to ourselves and to our society. That’s a big sentence. Let me break it down. Some traditional values that are respected here include: cleanliness, godliness, normality, adherence to specific gender roles, subjection to authority (even if that authority is somewhat misguided), respect for elders and family values.
All of these things have great merit. They provide stability from the storms of a scary and mean world. They tell us how to act. They let us know when we’re wrong. Yet at the same time, they lean us toward narrow-mindedness. If a particular movie, music style or way of dressing violates perceptions of decency and normalcy, then it’s “weird.” It is then discarded or left on the shelf for people in bigger cities or with more liberal inclinations to experience.
So what’s the result of this? Homogeneity and alienation. We exclude people who have different mindsets. Not only do we exclude them, we ridicule them and refuse to understand their lifestyles. For example, I tend to criticize people who are uninterested in art or music or “weird” movies as being shallow and somewhat sheltered. I fail to respect their convictions and get lost in the tiring pop culture world of name-dropping and information hoarding.
I don’t spend time with people who don’t see things the way that I see them, and therefore I miss opportunities to learn about their beliefs and about lives that are not entrenched in drama and exhibitions of intelligence. I do not evenly divide my time among my different sets of friends. I spend an inordinate amount of time with people who say the things that I want to hear and with people who agree with me and tell me nice things about myself. What narcissism! Yet I’m not the only one who does this. We find a niche and we carve out our norms. We lift our eyebrows at things that don’t adhere to these norms.
This niche carving, although healthy in some ways (everyone needs a support group), limits us. We surround ourselves with people who tell us our specific set of beliefs and ideas is right and infallible. This phenomenon exceeds ideas and bleeds over into our views of different ethnic groups, religions and any other nameable demographic.
We’re extremely America-centric. We have many international students here. They bond with each other, study together and play games on the Drill Field. We the proud, the many, the majority, never meet them. This is ridiculous. It’s also safe. How can our beliefs be challenged if we never truly listen to anything other than what we’ve always heard?
I worked with the English as a Second Language Center for a semester during my sophomore year. My language partner, Jinny, hailed from South Korea. While talking with her, I learned about her culture and about how she viewed our culture. It was refreshing to hear someone who had never seen things from my point-of-view.
I wish that we could all experience this. We should all get outside of our skin for a while and NOT disagree with someone who is different from us, but rather learn from them and view, even if for a moment, what life would be like outside of America, or even outside of Mississippi for that matter.
Different points of view make this world what it is. When we discredit all of those views as wrong, then our perception of humanity is skewed and incomplete. I do not think that all of us need to run and join a new religion or move to sub-Saharan Africa. I do, however, believe that we should seek out others whose lives differ from ours and try to learn from them. It’s time that we stop discrediting other people as “weirdos” and, for a moment, see ourselves as strange.
Joy Murphy is a senior English major.