letters from barabbas

I love how humanity is so diverse. Just as variety is the spice of life, one of our greatest treasures is our diversity. We say that personal preference is a source of diversity, and should thus be celebrated as a cardinal virtue. But what if we were wrong about that? What if personal preferences weren't what made us each lovely and diverse, but what drove us apart?

I'm going to draw a hasty parallel between food preferences--a minor concern--and cultural segregation--a much larger issue. I'm not talking about diversity between countries, but diversity between subcultures: the hip hop scene and the emo scene and the Christian scene, etc.
We say we don't like the taste of vegetables and we never try another dish with the offensive ingredient. But vegetables are good for you, and no one likes them at first. Your parents have to teach you to eat them. And for that matter, infants really only want milk. They are taught to eat. Children generally start out with very selective tastes in food, gradually expanding their diet to include more and more grown-up delicacies. But it seems the exact opposite with music and art. Children will dance to anything with a beat, and they can fingerpaint without even thinking about it. But as they grow up they start writing off certain expressions as lame or boring or out of their range, until they have very selective tastes in art.
I used to answer the question about my musical tastes with a fairly safe, stock answer: "I like pretty much everything, except for country and hip hop." [Translation: Country is too twangy and embarrassing because I'm from the south, and I don't get rap because I'm white.] But then I heard Lauryn Hill sing "To Zion" and then I learned about folk music, which is kind like country, and I had to change my tune. I learned that it is a grave mistake to ignore someone because they don't speak your jargon. And I learned that it is also a mistake to lend someone too much credit simply because they do speak your jargon. "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes" is a vapid waste of a valid form of poetic expression, but so is some of the careless, self-absorbed junk that's coming out of Nashville's contemporary christian scene. If you just want your cd's to provide background music that doesn't challenge your opinion of the universe, that's fine. Go ahead and listen to whatever. But if you want to really learn something about life, you had better hold it up to a higher standard than what genre it's filed under at the record store.
And so the emo kids miss out on the themes of social justice that permeate good rap music, and the hip hop crowd never hears the voice behind the passion in the emo-screamo-hardcore kid with a slight post-punk folky edge....or whatever. And the clubs are right next door, so why the sound-proof walls?

I'm beginning to think that our preferences really don't make us diverse, after all. We've all got something unique to say about the world and with personal creativity we're going to say it in a special way. God makes us diverse--not our tastebuds. What preferences do, though, is prevent certain valid forms of expression from reaching our minds. Think of how frustrated you get when your dad refuses to listen to your favorite cd--the most profound musical statement you've ever heard--because the rock's "too hard." Think of how frustrated he must get when you turn off some amazing old country hymn to listen to the fiftieth update of Shout to the Lord. We get so comfortable experiencing the entire world in a way that caters to our tastes that we forget what tasting is all about!

I once saw an episode of Fear Factor where the contestants sat around a soundstage campfire roasting the penises of large land mammals like they were hotdogs in a competition for a large sum of money. The nice girl had an elk, and the one who talked the most trash ended up with the water buffalo. She gagged the whole way through--violent, horrifying tremors that started in her diaphragm and travelled in waves off of her tongue--but she never threw up. She freaked out the next morning on some high-rise obstacle course and went home empty handed, but she sacrificed a lot of pride to win that money.
And I'm thinking, if she can eat that for something as useless as a million dollars, then can't I put aside my personal preferences to obtain good health, or enlightenment?