Bathroom Monologue: The Other

The Other is a blessing.

He is mindless and stupid, an ignorant sheep of architects and ideologies, yet we can hate him as though he’s responsible for everything he does. He knows nothing about what he is doing and knows he is wrong. He is heartless, has no real feelings, feels the wrong things, is utterly base, and perverts reason.

Every joke The Other makes about us is vile and abhorrent, while any insult we make toward him is the height of wit. His joke about your daughter’s weight is vulgar. We’ll mock him when he dies.

Every evil The Other commits reveals his true nature, while every evil we commit against him is accident or misunderstood or taken out of context or, really, if you think about it, justice.

If The Other was wiser, more compassionate, more reasonable, more tolerant, he would embrace our enlightenment. He would think like we do. Since he doesn’t, he receives none of our compassion, reason, tolerance or enlightenment. Certainly none of our wisdom. If we applied that, he couldn’t be The Other anymore.

Worse, we might not be us, and that would be unbearable. We’re grateful to The Other. We express it in all our bile, condescension, barbs and bombs. His mere existence allows us to not really be. We can non-exist in simple opposition to his perfect imperfections. His races, ethnicities, economics, politics, religions, hierarchies, biases, sports teams – we’re grateful for it all. The more he’s wrong about, the easier it is to choose what we aren’t, and maybe someday that’ll make us something. Something other.