Polarizing Figures

August 12, 2014
             Day 104

You're a polarizing figure when you constantly divide people into "us" and "them".  People who do this seem to think if someone believes one thing differently, they're automatically part of another group they don't want to be associated with. 

Star Wars taught me a great line a few years ago that's stayed with me.  Anakin Skywalker (the future Darth Vader) yells to Obi-Wan Kenobi, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!"  Obi-Wan frowns, and then scolds back at him, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes!"

We're all such vastly different people, and what seems to surprise us in this new age of technology and social media is that we're already close to the people we'd have otherwise "thrown away" as our enemies.

Social media is slowly teaching us that we're all connected to one another much more than we realize, and we're learning over time that we really are much more different than we thought.  We see friends and family members answer differently than we would have to random quizzes and surveys, we see them share things we'd never in a million years think is funny, and we see in a million ways all the time how many things we're all choosing to care differently about. 

It's helpful to remember though, that a polarizer is a good thing in camera work.  To quote Wikipedia, a polarizer "can convert a beam of light of undefined or mixed polarization into a beam with well-defined polarization".  The part of that line that jumps out to me right away is "well-defined".  When something or someone is polarizing, they are well defined.  We know who they are and what they believe.  Even if they are polarizing, pushing people into boxes, and making this world into an unnecessary game of us vs. them, they have at least shown us who they are.  They are standing firm in their beliefs, whether politically, socially, or fiscally.  When they do this, we can choose to avoid them or choose to gravitate toward them based on what they believe.

Either way, we are already surrounded by polarizing figures in our lives on social media, and it's forcing us to accept the many differences we all have.  More importantly, we should remember that for some, we ourselves are sometimes those polarizing figures we think we only see elsewhere!