A World Without “Us and Them”

There is no real room for “us” and “them” in a world shaped by compassion and equanimity. And yet, almost without noticing, we fall into that language. We draw lines. We sort and label. We decide, often from fear, that someone else is the problem—that they are deluded, dangerous, unpatriotic, or even evil. And once we do that, it becomes surprisingly easy to stop seeing a person at all, and to see only a story we are telling about them.

This way of seeing is far from the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Narges Mohammadi—each of whom, in different ways and at great personal cost, chose again and again to refuse the easy comfort of dehumanization. Their lives remind us that justice and compassion are not rivals, and that how we see is already how we act.

When two opposing forces meet—whether on the streets of Minneapolis or on the floor of the House of Representatives—the one who has no enemy carries a different kind of strength. Not louder. Not harder. But deeper.

A movement with no enemy can sound naïve. Don’t we need someone to blame, someone to hold the shape of our anger? And yet, is it possible to resist unjust systems, habits, and structures without turning living, breathing people into symbols of everything we fear? Each time we do that, something in us quietly closes.

Perhaps the real work is not to defeat anyone at all, but to stay human in a world that keeps inviting us to forget. Perhaps the only thing that truly needs undoing is the way of seeing that divides the world into worthy and unworthy, into us and them. And perhaps compassion is nothing more—and nothing less—than the daily practice of laying down our stories long enough to see one another again.