showing/building honor and respect, etc

[marbleglove]

I have a quick rant to make about showing honor and respect to either real people or to characters. This was inspired by a Veterans' Day radio bit which pissed me off. It was talking about how "Soldiers, not poets," did whatever. Allowed freedom, and free speech and whatnot. While it's annoying that it blatantly ignored the contributions of poets, that was more or less understandable given that it's Veterans' Day.

What was more distasteful was the fact that the radio apparently thought that the only way to honor veterans was to dishonor everyone else. This is distressingly common in writing, too: some authors think that the only way to show how smart one character is, is to show all the other characters are idiots. This way of looking at the world is also a main reason for domestic abuse: the only way for the one person to feel strong is for the other person to be weak.

The theory is wrong. Honor and respect and power are not a zero sum game. One person having these does not mean another person lacks. The opposite is true, they build upon each other. One of my favorite books is The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. It's about an assassin trying to get past security and a cop trying to track the assassin. What makes it so good, though, is that both characters are so spectacularly smart, tricky, and clever. If one of them were simply incompetent, then both would lose that quality. A person can be defined by their friends and their enemies. Only a very small person needs very small friends and enemies. A powerful person wants powerful friends and can deal with powerful enemies.

A quote of dubious origin (either Marianne Williamson or Nelson Mandela):

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. Thee's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Comments

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

You not only made sense but also made a very good point. Some amazing poetry has come from the trenches, as it were. And the majority of it has been anti-war, or at least nostalgic for home and peace and family.

In addition to cutting down others rather than simply raising the one, there's also the tendency for people to be given a single label which is supposed to sum up all that they are. A soldier, then, is just a soldier and nothing more; a poet is just a poet and nothing else. You make the important point that in truth people are much more complicated than that.

I've noticed that a lot of other-wise good NCIS fanfic will refer to Gibbs as "the marine" or occasionally "the sniper" but I've never seen him referred to as "the craftsman" or whatever the appropriate word is for maker-of-boats, which he also is. Even relatively good authors have trouble with this, though, because people just are complicated and even if you have a novel, it's not really enough space to truly encompass a whole person.