It takes a village
Heya! This blogpost was written based on a title I got traded by zoe!
If you wanna know about the how/why behind that, you can read the post I made that started this whole thing.
So, "it takes a village". Or, well, "it takes a village to raise a child", which i think would be the complete quote? Anyways, I obviously don't have any parenting experience, nor do i have the knowledge to really comment on that. But, it's also a quote about how much we're influenced by the environment we grow up in. I can talk about that. And I will. That's what this blogpost is about.
Have you ever read an online discussion about the death penalty? I promise this is relevant. Anyways, I have sadly had the misfortune of spending way too much time reading these sorts of discussions - the angry reddit or YouTube comment threads that devolve into mindless shit-slinging about two or three responses in. Without fail, when a topic like the death penalty is mentioned, you will always get responses in the vein of "oh, those evil criminals don't deserve to live". Maybe it's not quite phrased that way. But it will always be something along those lines. I'm not here to argue the death penalty, but what I am here to talk about is that specific line of reasoning, and how that relates to 'it takes a village'.
Because, calling criminals inherently evil, that sort of argument, it exemplifies something that i see way too often: People thinking 'oh, i would never do that. That murderer is inherently evil, we're completely different.'
Yes you would, and no you aren't. The thing people fail to acknowledge is that people don't just wake up one day and decide to be "evil". It's a result of their circumstances. Sure, I wouldn't kill someone. That's immoral. Let's say i grew up slightly differently. What if I had abusive parents. What if i had easy access to guns. I'm a good person, or at least I try to think of myself that way. But your environment, especially growing up, shapes so much of who you are. For a slightly more 'realistic' example: If my parents had less money, if they didn't support me when I started getting into programming, would i still be here, writing this blog?
Maybe I wouldn't have a computer, and in turn wouldn't have started playing ff14 years later, which in turn would mean i might not have figured out I was trans for a while longer, and I wouldn't have met my boyfriend. I was in a terrible mental state at the time, and those things really saved me, honestly. Would I still be alive today if my parents weren't supportive of my programming hobby? Or if they didn't have the money to get me a computer back then? I don't know. I'd like to think that, but I'm not sure. Your decisions are never entirely your own.
You don't have an innate sense of right and wrong. You build your frame of reference for what is acceptable based on the values the people around you hold. If the only models you have for relationships are abusive, you might think of that as the norm, as acceptable.
If everyone around you hates queer people, you're more likely to also do that. Yeah, you can explicitly reject that narrative, but that's also a reaction to your environment. You grew up in a context that resulted in you forming an opinion on the acceptability of queer people. If you were born in a different place where queer people are invisible, never discussed - then you might have ended up not having an opinion on them.
Even if you explicitly reject the values instilled into you by your environment, that rejection is still a product of the environment you grew up in. Because by having those ideals presented to you, you were forced to take a stance where you otherwise might not have taken one. Who you are as a person is determined by a ton of factors you mostly have no control over. People aren't born inherently evil, we are all Products of our circumstances, we're all human. That doesn't excuse any bad decisions we make, but it does mean that we can try to create a society where less people get born into the sort of circumstances that make them do bad stuff. Marking people as inherently evil or good dehumanizes them and makes it way harder to actually improve things.
'It takes a village' in the sense that who you are is determined by everyone and everything around you.
On an entirely different note, I've been quite busy lately, so if you've traded a blogpost with me/are wanting to do that - It'll probably be some time before I respond. Anyways, hope you found the post mildly interesting.