Compared to other base tenets that many of us accept and live by, such as that golden rule about doing unto others, there may be one that could be situated at the farthest and most opposite end of their spectrum. It may pale beside favorites like “love thy neighbor” or “be kind”, which sets it aside to be neglected and ignored, but it might as well be the sourest grape of them all: “You cannot please everyone”.
Convince me otherwise.No one can deny that this is absolutely true. Simply it implies, without any shade of a doubt, that what may be good for one, will definitely not be so for others. Paul Simon says it in his song, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor”.
This absoluto is perhaps why man has its many religions and churches, politics and governments, and then moving further down, why there are countless wars and walls and borders, fences and guns. Ad nauseam. All these exist in support of this forgettable but ignored basic truth of “you can’t please everyone.”
Sadly folks, because of this, we really can never be equal. In the US for example, the ongoing debate between ‘black lives matter’ and ‘all lives matter’, may both be so very encompassing and significant in terms of its scope and meaning, but it misses the point entirely.
Harsh as it is, universal calls for justice, unity, equality or freedom are merely that. No amount of upheavals or revolution can upend these, and when taken in the context of our divisive nature, they are thus doomed to remain as such, calls. Unless of course, a greater being tweaks something inside our grey matter and breaks that sequence.
And sure, we always hear fondly-used buzz words like “common good” and “mankind” as though they were running out of style. These emotion-tugging buttons, along with their appeal to our humane, sentimental and romantic nerves, are akin to those fairy tales for children that are solely aimed to appease everyone.
In ‘common good’, while one thing may turn out to be common for all, it is not necessarily good for anybody. For those disenfranchised, lies, like drugs and fairy tales may bring in a certain glimmer, like hoping for the future, but it does not actually liberate one from their existence of grasping at straws.
In the end, Buddha is correct. Life is hard, like ripping a band-aid off a wound. While yes, there may be a certain joy in being united of sorts despite our diversity, to believe we can be equal is illusory. After all, what may be good for us may not be acceptable to who else is out there.
“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught.” ― Baba Dioum
