Sitting in the MRI waiting room in my hospital pants, I noticed an older man staring at me. I had an unconnected IV sticking out of one arm and a bandage taped to my other antecubital fossa (that's the "elbow pit" or the inside crease where your arm bends at the elbow, you're welcome for the new vocab!).
"Looks like they beat ya up," he commented.
"Yeah my veins aren't always the most cooperative," I laughed.
"What're you fightin'?" He asked me.
I replied that I had MS (multiple sclerosis) and I shrugged lik;e it wasn't a big deal—I've been lucky compared to many people. Since he had brought it up, I asked him the same question.
"Cancer. Lymphoma."
He was quick to say that it was ok, and that he was learning a lot from it. Funny how quick we both were to try and minimize the depth of our medical concerns.
"I'm old, so it doesn't really matter. It's you kids I'm worried about," he said.
The conversation was brief, because I was called by the technician to come to the MRI. If you've never had an MRI, it is a spectacular technology. There's a huge boxy machine with a hole in the middle. A platform juts out of the hole on tracks that run all the way inside the machine. The room is full of cabinets and other equipment that I can never quite picture in my memory because the bulk of my time is spent inside the machine. It's cold and the room hums with fans and who knows what other machines running.
I hop onto the bed, refusing the stool because I sometimes forget how short I am. The emergency squeeze-ball is placed in my hand and a cage is secured over my face. My platform is rolled into the hole in the machine and so begins the hour and a half MRI, loud mechanical beeps and clicks all around me and the occasional shuddering as images of my brain and spine are taken. You have to hold completely still so that they don't have to redo images. That's a long time for me to be thinking about the conversation I just had, to think about the machine I'm inside, and to try and stay calm and breathe through the whole process.
Monstrosity and Humanity
Having just had another infusion and now an MRI all in a month's time, my thoughts have swirled around the medical field and the patients' lives. It's a very conflicting experience to receive treatment in the Oncology office of the clinic I go to, because that means the overwhelming majority of people I see there are receiving chemotherapy. I see people getting "the talk" with the doctor for their first time as they nervously prepare for an excruciating time ahead. I see veteran patients who know the drill, bust out their blankets and a book. Rarely, there are people who get to ring the bell that hangs in the room for those who have received their final treatment to announce their glorious achievement.
And there are surely people that I cannot see again.
I started my own medical journey in my late twenties, and I am not unique or special, but there are many people who don't have to face this. Obviously, I don't see these cancer patients in their worst hours, I don't care for them like a nurse or a family member, I don't know them outside of what I can observe in the 16 hours a year I spend there. But those hours are a unique reminder to me that there are so many more lives and pains and agonies out there that are not mine, and although that means it doesn't get much attention from society, that doesn't mean it's not there, that it doesn't matter. It's a reminder to me to put more effort into my empathy and to think about their experiences more often, because otherwise I will atrophy and lean on old frameworks of thought that throw out humanity in favor of able-bodied automata as soon as possible.
There are many ways in which we can hide or avoid these heart-wrenching snippets of humanity. Many of them are the same ways we deal with other difficult topics or situations. We distract, diminish, disregard, or doom-scroll them away. But there's one more way that may not be as apparent: we create monsters.
The philosopher of horror Noel Carroll invented the term category jamming and makes an argument that fits nicely with findings from developmental psychology. Experiments demonstrate that animals and humans respond to their earliest experiences by internalizing a cognitive classification system based on the creatures they regularly encounter. After a certain time, however, the classification system "solidifies" into a cognitive framework, and any subsequently strange and unclassifiable encounter produces fear in the knower. Categorical mismatch makes the knower very uncomfortable. —On Monsters, by Stephen T. Asma, 2009, page 184
If this is true that both people and animals effectively learn who fits into what category, then the argument for diversity is even more important and more impactful. To live in a homogenous utopia is possibly the worst way to grow up if humanity is of any kind of value. Our "classification system" is solidified when we are young and although I don't think it's fixed, it clearly becomes an obstacle for us to expend more energy, time, and intention in overcoming. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and ablism are reinforced when we lack diversity, because it's always easier to fear (and hate) a person who is different and unknown than a person that you do know who is still different in some way.
Regarding medical concerns, this is a really tough one for me as a certified germaphobe who also wants to be compassionate. We have a sense of disgust, which is supposed to help us avoid things that can hurt us, like excrement or rotten food or other things that carry disease and pose a threat to our health. To the extent we can trust the Bible in this matter, we at least have stories about "lepers" who are ostracized from society in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading to others—and the Bible also shows us deep-rooted prejudices about these people. To me, this is a warning about how easy it is to allow our disgust to (monstrously) break through the barrier of disgust-as-a-tool for protecting physical health and disgust-as-a-tool for demonizing humans who are different and justifying oppression, violence, and hatred.
Carroll arrived at his own mismatch theory by noticing that most horror monsters are disgusting as well as threatening. He argues that human beings seem especially disgusted by "impurity." Things that we find impure and consider to be abominations are usually interstitial entities, in between normal categories of being. —On Monsters, page 184
We don't have to look far to see how people can be turned into monsters. In horror movies, women can be scary just because they're old and wrinkly. There is awful rhetoric—coming from the White House—linking immigrants to "aliens" suggesting that immigrants are just as inhuman and dangerous as invaders from Mars. Trans people are demonized and feared to the extent that people are willing to lose their own bodily autonomy and safety (and wholesale sacrifice of all women's safety) to tyrants because of an imagined concept of what being transgender is. My own church has taught to this day that queerness fits into a category of disease by its insistence that it can be "fixed" or "changed" with the right prescription of righteousness, or, more recently that queerness must simply be avoided and suppressed, as though it could flare up if not constantly pushed down and disregarded.
The lesson here? Our disgust is easy to manipulate. Find a group that you don't understand or don't like, use your disgust to drive you farther and farther from them until you can no longer see their humanity. It may not even take that long.
If we know that proximity and diversity and empathy help to create a resilient society, then pursuing homogeneity and segregation are sure ways to create a shatterable one. A society driven by fear cannot abide the complexity of life. You can't get around it, because utopia is still filled with people who will vary, people who will eventually experience disability or disease, people who will think differently, look differently. The cure is not the mirage of the snake oil that we are being sold right now. There is no cure, because nothing is actually broken. Humanity doesn't need to be fixed, it needs to be seen.
Humanity is in the stranger who makes conversation with you in the waiting room, who knows what it's like to experience pain and loss and frustration, and who can sit with you in a moment of fear or anxiety. Humanity is in all of us accepting all of us.
Notes
"...nor do we intend to admit to our campus any homosexuals. If any of you have this tendency and have not completely abandoned it may I suggest that you leave the campus immediately after this assembly...we do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence." —Ernest Wilkinson, President of BYU, Talk given in 1965
"[Trump's] claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country." "...he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”" —From 'rapists' to 'eating the pets': Trump has long used degrading language toward immigrants
"...the close links between prejudice and disgust could mean that individuals may associate transgender people with one or more of these subtypes of disgust based on the negative stereotypes and connotations they hold about transgender individuals." —Disgust, Morality, and the Transgender Bathroom Debate