The fundamental basis for acceptance should be each other’s humanity.

You know that experience when you go to a party, a meet up of some kind, well, any kind of gathering really. It’s that moment when you meet someone new and the questions begin. So, what do you do for a living, where you from, what do you drive. Seemingly innocuous questions, and yet in reality they are far from it.

What they always seem to me is an assessment of whether you are an acceptable person to know, whether you are worth taking the effort to get to know better. As though the answers to these basic questions sum up in a couple of minutes whether or not I am worthy of acceptance.

Humans it seems, at least it seems the humans of the western world seem to hone this skill from a very early age. By the time we enter the school yard we have already got this skill pretty much down.

The last few days I have been reminded of an event that happened to me in primary school, which, I think, demonstrates this quite well. My school life was quite transient, by the time I was in the 4th grade of school I was at my 4th school. I felt like I was the perpetual new kid in the class. Of course, teachers did their best to see me included, but as a child that had by the time they began school already endured significant trauma, couldn’t work out why it was they felt different to everyone else and had been a target of bullying in every social situation I found myself in, it seemed no matter what the teacher tried acceptance was simply not an option.

One thing I know for sure is that bullies have a radar for victims. It’s as though we have a big V for victim painted on our foreheads that only the bullies can see, but see it they do.

I tried everything to be accepted during school. Nine times out of ten I failed. I tried starting fights, stealing, trying to be good, trying to be bad, giving away my lunch. But none of it worked, for anything more than fleeting moments. It was never enough to be enduring.

There was one thing that happened in Grade 4. I received from my grandparents a new cricket bat for my birthday. It was a wonderful cricket bat. I loved it, I took it to bed with me on the night I received it. During that year of school our teacher used to take us out to the school oval for a modified game of cricket a couple of times a week. There was this one time, when for some reason there was only one cricket bat in the kit and so we were short of a bat to use for the game.

At this time, I lived in a home that adjoined the school property, we even had a little gate in our back fence to give us access into the school. Well, anyway, I said to my teacher I could run home and get my cricket bat. I think somewhere in my mind was this would make me the saviour of the game and thus avoiding returning to the classroom to do dreaded school work. I was kind of correct, my teacher gave permission and I ran like the wind across the school yard through the gate down to our garage and grabbed my bat and sprinted back to school with it.

I felt triumphant. I smiled deeply on my face and deeply within myself as the class cheered as I returned with the bat. After that day, I never attended school without that bat with me. That bat had a magical power of providing me acceptance. Of course, that acceptance was somewhat fleeting. It only applied when cricket games were on. It certainly wasn’t enduring.

How is it that we have allowed ourselves to get to this place? A place where we rate as acceptable those we inhabit this earth with on the basis of their possessions, their income potential. Essentially, we consider a person acceptable not on the basis of humanity but on the basis of their potential to provide something to us.

It’s a terrible indictment on what we have become.

How is it we have allowed the humanity of each other to not be the defining factor of our acceptance of each other. That we decide on the basis of a person’s possessions, health, and career rather than on the fact that they are human that they are or are not worth accepting as fellow travellers of life.

I believe it is this that has allowed us to descend into a situation where we make judgments on people’s value on the basis of their ability. At times this judgment is so sharp it determines if we allow a fellow human to even exist or begin their life on this earth.

For some, on the basis, not of their humanity, but on their neurology, we judge them deficient, broken, diseased etc. We refuse to accept people for who they are as human persons because of difference. We other them, to the point they are isolated, bullied and abused; that they question their worth constantly, and often struggle with mental health issues for the bulk of their lives.

Surely this must stop. Surely this is a road to ruin. A ruin of the very humanity each of us possess. A road that leads to the breakdown of society as we know it. Maybe not today, maybe not next year or even next decade, but certainly we are on that trajectory. We must stop this. We must start looking to the humanity of the people we inhabit this world with and value it.

A person’s disability, sexuality, gender identity does not make them worthy or unworthy of acceptance. It is a person’s humanity that makes them inherently worthy of acceptance. The rest, well that just adds to the wondrous diversity of what it is to be human and share this planet with other humans.

What a completely inferior place this earth would be if we were all the same, if we were all moulded from our own self-image.

Wouldn’t it be grand if acceptance of each other on the basis of our shared humanity went viral?