This is a good example of how love, curiosity and fear can be mistaken emotions of the adoring. They really want to share their respect and get others to respect them back the way they respect their idol, hero or those select few that transcend history to be still relevant for today and tomorrow. Legends they became and now they are symbols for the identity we have fought for just like our parents and their parents. Today it is now our task to keep respect for our identity which defines so much of who we are, what values we have and share. In hard times where doubt sets in, we look back for examples but really we should see those examples in our own reflection in a mirror. My reflection in the mirror is strong, so it tells me who I am and I know what to do. So we move forward and do the right thing without even having to look back to the past now. Our identity is our guide for the future.
I got an idea when I saw the following tweet: https://twitter.com/stepvda/status/1700612277987066313?s=20 Apparently this conversation breaker from Gandhi is seen as a test that most women fail. No data on men by the way. I find this tweet to be somewhat manipulative and probably if accurate taken out of a context which is not re-explained sufficiently.
My family's creed is "do good and don't look back" (in Dutch: "Doe goed en zie niet om."). This stuck with me since I was little. In today's polarized world where people loose fate in so many things, they eventually also start doubting themselves and who they are. Throughout our lives we should try harder to understand our shared identity as well as our very personal own identity. What is the history? Who made sure back then that the principles and values we still believe in today were there in the first place and who next made sure they were past on to us from generation to generation?
My own very personal and true life lesson here was that me being gay was something I only came to terms with late in life and the hurdles that followed also made it hard to out myself as gay at work. For sure my parents could have done more to help me recognize myself as gay earlier as a child but their busy jobs did not allow a lot of time with the kids; my brother and me. I was always nervous, afraid while I should have been more aware of who I am and not get distracted with the negative feelings I kept having about this for a long time.
My identity as a kid focussed on the examples on which a democratic and free society is built: Ghandi, King, Mandela, .... I was always very aware of what injustice happened in the world and the struggle that was before and the one that still is today. However when it came to myself and my own struggles, I was blind. Why did I not put Harvey Milk in the list of examples to look up to for instance. Well we weren't thought about this gay activist in San Francisco. In 1978 he was shot death together with SF mayor George Moscone. This was a pivotal moment in California for gay rights. Sodomie was a crime and gay men were thrown in jail. State politics started to change after this double murder and provided an example for the rest of the States and the world. (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk)
If I had allowed Harvey Milk and his struggle to be part of my identity early on, and had learned about it in school, I would have seen the invisible part of me that needed to come out, and I would have seen this example and many more that would help me further to define myself. Gay at school, gay at university never happened. I was closed up in the closet and always afraid.
When you limit yourself and your understanding of yourself to your understanding of what is around you, it becomes so much harder and lengthier to discover yourself. But more sow, being gay is not all who I am, my family's history, my mom's Belgian side and the other half of me from my father, the Dutch side and so on.
We should look closer and find out more about ourselves. This will help us feel more grounded during uncertain times. This polarizing world is in desperate need of more Mahatma Ghandi's, more Martin Luther Kind Jr.'s and more Nelson Mandela's. We have so much more to teach kids now so it should make it easier to help them find themselves with ever more examples that they recognize themselves in. Me, I did not learn about Harvey Milk at school, I did see the movie "Milk" later (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/).
You can do this to. Why don't you start now? Take the example of where you now live, the place you are from, then look further: what other places would you still want to move to and live? What work you do now and what profession you might also want to exercise or that you always dreamt of exercising instead of what you do now. Much more to learn, many new skills, so many other cultures, to choose from, even just tiny bits, so much to continue to define from. From now on we know ourselves better, the backdrop of our history is clear and has settled. New ideas make it even more clear who we still want to be and further still more to discover. Our believes in our identity will become stronger in an ever more diverse world where there is ever more to learn from people living ever closer together. Human's will thrive much more in a world with more freedom to trade, with more freedom for movement of goods and where people have more freedom to travel to and move to. Our identities today are not being threatened in themselves in todays polarized world. Our fear of everything right now, wildfires, climate change, bills to pay, this fear is taking up so much time from our minds to think that it leads to us now only thinking less about who we are. We allow ourselves to be chased around by populists and one sided news that only tells us what is believed based on what we want to hear. Our minds become poorer as we spend less time to grow ourselves. We get retrenched in little physical or virtual burrows while we should try to aim for the opposite and start with our own identity. Newcomers, people traveling, immigrants, all of them are bringing us opportunities and provide us more options about who we want to stay, how our current identity gets seen differently by other people, making it automatically more granular and detailed. New views on ourselves arrive and our identity is richer and stronger, better able to take a punch during hardship. Now we can see what else and even who else we can consider examples to adopt and add to our own identity, or quiet the opposite and find confirmation for our own identity in how it stands out from the identity of another. As time moves forward and we continue to grow we pass on and we allow others to grow more, even more then where we got already in life today, you at your age, me at my age. Those after us will have gown more and we will have paved to way for their accomplishments which for us and our lives will never escape our imagination or fantasy. But you and I already dream what can be.