Black holes and silent acceptors
How many moments happen in your life where you think to yourself, “I don’t like what’s about to happen”? In those moments, how many times do you feel like you’re not comfortable speaking up? Sometimes it’s “not important”, or “someone else will say something”, but we all find a lot of reasons to accept things that are happening around us and to us, even though we don’t like it and probably have a better option. There’s a collection of forces that combine to help us turn ourselves into what I call “silent acceptors,” passive recipients of the world: socialized values of “getting along”, lack of comfort with confrontation, past experience with having our opinions devalued or attacked, the comfortable numbness of turning our brains off and being hypnotized by our televisions and computers. What brought me to writing this is the end result – we’re all fairly dissatisfied with the world today, with the poor behavior, lack of social graces, lack of accountability that those in positions of power show to those beneath them, and I see it happening largely due to being a community of acceptors.
Consider this counter-intuitive statement for a moment – the defender is the one who starts the war. If the defender decides it’s not worth fighting, the aggressor gets what he wants and it’s all over. There will always be people who feel like the world exists solely for their benefit, that the rules apply differently for them – the question is, who’s going to tell them ‘no’? We’ve become too comfortable with hoping that someone else will do that for us, so that we can avoid that test of wills. We’re also gun-shy, feeling like we can’t count on the support of others to stand up for basic things because those around us are hunkered down in their foxholes.
Black holes, to digress for a moment, are nature’s perfect acceptor – they sweep up everything in their reach, and their pull extends out in ever-increasing area. They literally warp the fabric of the universe due to the pull they exert. Black holes have what is known as the “event horizon” – a point at which it becomes impossible for matter to escape the pull of the black hole. If we act like black holes, accepting everything that happens to us, we warp the behavior of those around us because we tell them that it’s okay – we create an event horizon where the right choices and behaviors can no longer find their way back into the light.
We have to stop ourselves from being black holes – and do it in a way that doesn’t turn us into the thing we dislike. We have to stop wishing that “someone else” will hold people accountable, that it’s okay to be like Randy Moss and take a play off every now and then. We have to spend our time and effort upholding the things we value – or we don’t value them very much. We have to exercise our ability to speak respectfully and firmly, to ask for change, and to explain the impact that others’ actions have on us – because if we do not, if we accept things we dislike because we don’t have the confidence to speak, then like a black hole we will draw everything down with us.