I hear much too often these days from parents who’ve found out that all of their child’s school friends or neighborhood friends have been invited to a birthday party — all except for their own child.
It’s happened twice to my own children. When I witnessed their shattered, bewildered looks over being left out, it broke my heart. Turns out it in our case and those of others to which I am privy that it was the parents, not their kids, who decided to exclude kids from their own children’s reindeer games.
Being left out is the worst feeling in the world, made even worse by the fact that the excluded child (and often also the child’s parents) is left to wonder — What did I do wrong? Why are they leaving me out? I thought we were friends. You feel guilt, shame, depressed. Your self esteem takes a big hit. You try to hold your head high, but when you let down your guard, find that your chin is sagging and your lower lip juts out in hurt, a sense of mourning, that you are on the outside, just as they had planned.
You want to hold your head high, convince yourself that those who excluded you don’t deserve you. But you might also give anything not to have been excluded in the first place. Or you might try to figure out how to get back to the good graces of those who humiliatingly left you out. It just sucks.
Exclusion is an awful form of bullying, and often has the most lasting damaging repercussions, believe you me. It is rampant in America. It is extremism, willful and wanton silo-ing, in action.
One may claim that exclusion is a manifestation of polarization, but what it really is, more than anything, is not just a symptom of how much Americans silo themselves but that now life in a bubble is practiced in a way that makes those who are not part of one’s exclusive bubble know that they are ‘less than,’ ‘undesirables,’ and in a way that is so in your face that it can’t help but have repercussions for society as a whole if practiced on a grand scale.
The New York Times noted in an article that all but one state legislature is dominated by a single party, which pushes its own agenda with complete deaf ears to the party left out.
From birthday parties to political parties, exclusion is all the rage in America. Those left out feel helpless, impotent, angry as all get-out when it’s one part of adults excluding another.
I know what it’s like to be left out of the party. A philanthropic group that ballyhoos itself as ‘trust based,’ once had the noble mission of cultivating among diverse folks rational-critical thinking skills and constructive emotions. This approach and ethos rolled into one clearly can be a, or the, most vital foundational step for bridging chasms among humans, and, more concretely, for enabling diverse souls to come together in ways that make it possible for them to feel a sense of ‘all for one and one for all-ness,’ and come up with imaginative longterm solutions to our most vexing issues revolving around social, political and economic equity.
This philanthropic group had long invited me, as executive director of Democracy Cafe, to their retreats, which I always looked forward to. It’s fun to be ‘in,’ and energizing to connect and share experiences with other souls hard at work in the civic sphere, especially those who claim to share my aim of making ours a more inclusive and connected and participatory society on all scales.
Down the road, a hurtful thing happened — I was at a different gathering of civic and social justice movers and shakers, organized by the inimitable Eric Liu and his Civic University, and I crossed paths there with a woman who also attended the retreat for the ‘trust based’ philanthropic foundation. ‘I’ll see you there next month at the retreat,” she said matter of factly.
“See me where?” I queried.
“At the retreat.”
“What retreat?”
She filled me in, telling me she’d just gotten her e-vite from their new co-executive director, and that she was sure I’d soon get one too. I didn’t.
I wrote to their freshly minted co-executive director, who’d previously been the event planner for the retreat. She didn’t reply. I forwarded my message to her twice. No reply.
Time passed. I eventually received a message from her co-executive director, a very well-compensated white guy even older than I am. He informed me in an email dripping with condescension that I had indeed not been invited, that I no longer fit in, that my age and demographics were no longer quite right. Oh, but he assured me, I’d be kept in mind for future gatherings. Uh huh.
It hurt my feelings a great deal then, especially the smarmy way I found out I’d been excluded, and the smarmier explanation as to why, and it still smarts. Like children excluded from a birthday party, I catechized myself: Why do they dislike me so much that they’d go out of their way to exclude me? What had I done wrong?
This philanthropic organization had taken a sharp turn to the orthodox radical left, its notions of what it means to achieve equity in society now myopically delineated, but even so, it was a shock to be left out. People of their self-righteous extremist mindset on the left, as well as on the right and elsewhere truly see themselves as those who know ‘the Way, the Truth and the Light’ better than all the rest of us mere mortals. I get that. But if that’s what we’ve become on a sweeping scale as Americans, we’re heading for the same kind of decline, I’d wager, as the one in the West’s first democracy in ancient Athens.
Now, I have very passionate, heartfelt beliefs. But I also operate from the assumption that I could be wrong, so I regularly create forums where others who see things from different perspectives based on different accumulated stores of wisdom can challenge my way of seeing and doing. I find such regular exchanges open my imaginative, empathic and existential lenses.
For nearly a quarter century, I have held inquiries — and have established Socrates/DemocracyCafe inquiry initiatives — the world over. I strive to follow the Socratic ethos of both striving to know oneself and striving to become ever more a world citizen. I have dual U.S. – Greek citizenship, and also speak Spanish fluently, holding inquires regularly throughout Latin America, where racism and exclusion-based marginalization is woefully pervasive. I also continue to remember well the painful stories shared by my father and grandmother about the racism they’d experienced against poor Greeks like them who’d immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920 and 30s. My father developed a lisp because he was teased so mercilessly when an elementary school student about his thick Greek accent.
To this day, I feel the pain of anyone and everyone who is on the receiving end of deliberate exclusion. Quite often, if not more often than not, I’d bet that those who become part of extremist groups have at some point in their upbringing been excluded by the ‘in crowd.’
Rather than throw in the towel in this age of extremist-driven exclusion, we at Democracy Cafe have redoubled our efforts to combat it, while there’s hopefully still time.
If you consider the age, gender, demographics of those involved in our initiatives, our nonprofit is making tremendous inroads in contributing towards greater equity of many sorts (social, political, what have you). The advances we’ve made – most recently in India, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the bilingual Socrates Cafes in the palliative care program for end of life patients in Los Angeles, empowering women and youth in particular – are the proof in the pudding, tho’, alas, this doesn’t fit into their narrowly circumscribed, fundamentalist rubric of what equity is all about.
The world I want is one I’d want my young children to grow up in — one where we entertain a variety of bracing perspectives, where we continually make the heartfelt attempt to bridge chasms between human souls, where we see ourselves as works in progress, in which human being — doing, making and saying in all its dimensions — is both an autonomous and collective affair at one and the same time, in which we are forever pushing outward and upward the boundaries for what being co-creators in and of our universe can amount to.
My wife of 21 years, Ceci, who is Mexican, is a longtime social justice civic entrepreneur like few others. Before we met and married, Ceci had been a teacher in an indigenous community in Chiapas, Mexico, where denizens all too often are kicked out of their own communities, or ejidos, because they have differing religious and political beliefs — sometimes too liberal, sometimes too far on the right — from the majority. Ceci has an empathy born of an open heart and mind that puts most to shame. Whenever she discovers someone has been left out, she goes to great lengths to bring them into the fold. If only the entire world was made up of Ceci’s.
Widespread self-righteousness, alas, blinds the excluders to the damage they are doing to the excludees, and to the world as a whole here and now, and generations to come.
This is not in any way to say that we should bring all people of all belief systems and practices within our fold with open and loving arms. But it is to say, among other things, that we should take a hard look at ourselves and our own beliefs, prejudices, potentially exclusionary practices, and make damn sure we judge ourselves first and foremost before judging others. And we should also ask ourselves if we are in fact more part of the problem, creating walls rather than bridges at the worst possible time, or whether we are genuinely part of the solution.
I know this: it sucks not to be invited to the party. I saw a Facebook post from the co-executive director of this ‘trust based’ philanthropic foundation that had excluded me. She said there was post-retreat ‘party on my page’ and she invited all comers to be part of it.
I went to her FB page, saw the reveling, and felt worse than ever. I wasn’t part of the party any longer.
But I’m not one to brood overlong in a pity party way. So come join me and those who regularly take part in our hundreds of ongoing Socrates Cafe/Democracy Cafe-spearheaded gatherings the world over in thinking outside our bubbles, in thinking in a dazzling array of colors.
Come join me in being part of the Anti-Exclusion Party.
Party on.
But ask yourself: Have you, at any point or points in your life, been left out? What did it feel like, or does it feel like, to be excluded? And what did you do — what are you doing — in response?
Have you ever been the ‘excluder’? What prompted you to leave out the ‘excludee’?
What can we do, individually and together, to lessen the chances of those hurtful kinds of exclusions that can do lasting harm to a fellow human?