I suppose if you’re large and exceedingly strong, or if you have a few good helpers, you might be able to accomplish the literal task with relative ease. But really, what would be the point?
Of course, there’s no point in putting a person in a figurative box, either, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it in perpetuity. Indeed, it’s hard not to.
My yoga teacher is a yuppie. My kids are picky eaters. My husband is a fitness nut, and I’m a white, urban, progressive, beer snob who can’t seem to get through a day without applying a label of some sort to someone, somewhere.
I realized I had a problem when, driving home a few days ago, I spotted an old Volkswagen with a circle of dancing bears on its bumper and a “Cheney ‘08” sticker prominently displayed in its rear window. Dumbfounded, I swerved and tailgated, sped up and braked, doing everything I could to get a look inside the vehicle. Who, I wondered, could possibly drive a Volkswagen — the vehicle of peace, love and Fahrvergnugen — and simultaneously support Dick Cheney?
It was a mystery I was determined to solve, yet despite my best efforts — during which I nearly rear-ended and sideswiped the car in question — I couldn’t get a clear view of the driver.
Frustrated, I continued to lurch down outer Congress Street with the rush hour traffic, wondering what a peace-loving hippie campaigning for the Hub of the Axis of Evil would look like.
She (I had determined that much, at least, from the hairstyle) was three cars ahead of me at a traffic light when I finally decided I was being ridiculous and that I didn’t actually NEED to see her face.
After all, even though she was driving a VW with a Grateful Dead sticker, she didn’t necessarily have to be a hippie, and it was unfair of me to classify her as such. Perhaps she had bought the car secondhand, with the dancing bears already affixed. Or maybe she just liked the look of the rainbow parade of ursidae and didn’t understand their connection to Jerry Garcia and all things tie-dyed. But regardless of her reason for being behind the wheel of that car, I didn’t know her, and seeing her face wasn’t going to help me do anything but apply more meaningless labels to the situation.
The truth is, even when we know people well, we have no business classifying them and stuffing them into neat little boxes, primarily because they never fit.
While labels can be helpful in some situations — such as choosing suitable Christmas gifts or deciding which jokes are appropriate in which company — too often the labels we apply serve to limit our views of people rather than expand them.
So that was that. Having had my little epiphany, I decided to leave the woman in the VW alone. While I still didn’t approve of her support for Cheney under any circumstances, I was at least willing to resist minimizing her by assigning her to a series of meaningless categories.
Ironically, after coming to this decision, I found myself directly behind the VW as we merged onto 295 near Denny’s, only to realize that I had missed an important aspect of the Cheney bumper sticker. As it turned out, his running mate for ‘08 was Lord Voldemort. And the driver of the car? When I cruised past on the highway, I sneaked a glance, only to see a young man with dreadlocks.
Belinda Ray is a homeschooling mother and freelance writer who finds time to write when her children and their friends have lightsaber battles in the yoga room (but only if the laundry is already folded and everyone’s been fed.)