If you don’t measure up to my standards, I will
have nothing to do with you. Such a
statement represents a unified approach to life. It is based on the assumption that such
exclusion is possible. Exclusion in this
view has no serious repercussions or very few of them. The excluder feels insulated and isolated
from any ill effects of exclusion. The
only person exclusion hurts, so the thinking goes, is the person excluded. And the person who does the excluding has no
ownership in that pain. The excluded
person brought it upon themselves. The
concept of exclusion is thus very neat and tidy and allows for a sense of immense
self-righteousness on the part of the excluder and a profile of great rectitude. At base of this view is the denial that people
are extensively and inherently interconnected.
Hurt can be easily contained and externalized is the fundamental
assumption. That very little in history or
human experience supports this view is conveniently forgotten. The far more realistic assumption is that
pain is always shared in one way or another.
Inclusion rather than exclusion turns out to be the enduring dynamic in
the end.
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