I previously blogged my theory that we should not feel thankful for basic human rights or basic standard of living, instead feeling entitled to such things and taking them for granted.
Today my shower gave me an analogy:
Suppose I'm about to get married, and you ask me why I was going to marry that particular person. Starry-eyed, with little hearts circling around my head, I answer "Because he never hits me!"
That's not a good reason, now is it? Of course, it is something one should expect in a spouse. But it's so baseline that we should be taking it absolutely for granted and not even noticing it.
Now let's suppose I'm so genuinely thankful that my husband doesn't hit me that I express this at the slightest provocation. My husband might start to develop the sense that he's doing me a great favour by not hitting me, so he might feel less inclined to do me other favours like not flushing the toilet when I'm in the shower, or wearing headphones if he's going to stay up gaming on a night before I need to get up early for work the next morning. If a friend asks me for relationship advice, I might say something like "Does he hit you? No? Then what more can you ask for?", completely disregarding the fact that she's more comfortable and relaxed when she's alone than when her man's around. If I have a child, I might try to instill what I consider good relationship sense in her by talking about how thankful I am that my husband doesn't hit me and how important that is in a relationship. And, by doing this, I might be making her feel like she's being too picky for rejecting a prospective spouse whose life goals are incompatible, because she feels like she should just be grateful he doesn't hit her.
In short, what influence I have would be lowering the expectations of the people around me, encouraging them to accept lower standards. Whereas if I take for granted that he doesn't hit me, I'll instead be gushing starry-eyed about how how he's the best friend I've ever had and how I'm a better version of myself when I'm around him. What influence I have would encourage those around me to seek out similar compatibility in their relationships. And my hypothetical child, having grown up in a context where being hit by one's spouse is unheard of, would react with utter disbelief the first time she hears of such a thing. "He HIT you??? WTF? People just don't DO that to people they love!"
4 comments:
That would indeed be setting the bar too low. But I still want to feel grateful and thankful that I'm in a supportive, positive relationship, because I never want to take my partner for granted. That analogy works (for me) for the human rights and first-world living standards, too.
Ah, here's a new thought for me on this. Does it perhaps matter where or to whom that gratefulness is being directed? For my legal right to abortion (from the other thread), I am grateful to feminist activists who fought for it. For my better-standard workplace, I am grateful for the labour movement. I'm not grateful to a god or country or my family.
That's interesting, because I never consciously thought of thankfulness as being thankful to someone, I always thought of it in terms of being thankful for something.
On further reflection, I think in cases where when gratitude occurs organically, I'm naturally thankful to the person who did me the kindness. But when people are telling me I should be thankful, they're most often telling me I should be thankful for.
But in the specific example of activists, if you look at it the other way around, from the activists' point of view, don't they want to eventually be taken for granted? For example, if 30 years from now people are still actively thankful that same-sex marriage is an option, I'd take that as a sign that something went wrong. 30 years from now, we should be taking it so for granted that "I'm going to a gay wedding this weekend" will sound slightly homophobic (like how saying "I'm going to an interracial wedding this weekend" sounds slightly racist.)
You're right in one sense, we want our rights to be matter of fact and unremarkable. But in another sense, I wish more people would recognize that rights are demanded, fought for, and won, not given - and even after they're won, they need to be protected or they will be diminished or lost.
But yeah, my gratefulness is often about grateful to. But I do have the grateful for, too. I like to be reminded of my privilege, as I said earlier or elsewhere.
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