High school was not a particularly fun period of life for me. Besides the fact that my high school experience is the sort of thing that would inspire a second-tier MTV dramatic series, involving large amounts of writing, some death threats, awkwardness aplenty, and a diverse group of supporting characters, all of which are very dramatic but not very enjoyable to endure, there is the fact that one thinks that others will grow out of the silly identity politics that make the teenage years so futile. Fat chance. In fact, a great deal of the evils of our world boil down to teenage drama that should have been grown up long before.

Why is this? An evil aspect of our times is the ubiquity of identity politics, something that lies at the base of nearly every single internet argument I am in. Whether we are dealing with questions of gender, ethnicity, organizational loyalty, or social class, people have images of themselves, and more importantly, images of “others” that they are hostile to and see as threats and this creates drama as well as conflict as we seek opportunity and see threats to that in the monolithic identities of others. All too often the advantages we seek in shared identity with others ends up creating drama and enemies with others simply because of those identities, and not because anything personal has been done. When this hostility is a given, personal drama between different groups of people is a given.

This conflict can range from the trivial and annoying, like one of those nippy therapy dogs (like French poodles), to the serious. Trivial and annoying conflicts are the ones that result from “tribal” loyalties like sports teams. As someone who doesn’t tend to gloat about the victory of a team (since I know how transitory it is), I get rather irritated at those who gloat themselves, especially because sports is not particularly meaningful anyway in a larger social way, except as a source of expensive entertainment as well as social control. Even though I am an immensely competitive person, the results of games are by and large not very meaningful to me. I draw my deeper lessons from behavior, and that can generally use a lot of work.

The deeper conflicts of our world, and the more meaningful ones, result from larger cultural identities that serve to divide us. For me, receiving advantages because of family, class status, gender, or ethnicity is an abomination. It is an abomination if it is an old boy’s club or if it is affirmative action. I hate the fact that I am asked for “diversity” information all the time in filling out job applications, seeing my status as a white man as a disadvantage, while having self-righteous and bitchy women complaining all the time about imaginary discrimination against them. This is unacceptable. Nor is it a new problem. One of the more frustrating aspects of my high school experience was trying to find need-based scholarships and financial aid and finding that most of it was tied to race, which was completely useless to me, besides being unjust. When societies try to right historical wrongs by wronging others, they create conflict where no conflict needs to exist, by making everyone bitter against others for discrimination, instead of treating others with dignity and honor for being human, and not seeing any need to create a systemic bias to achieve a desired quota.

And this is why high school never ends, because identity never ceases to become a point of conflict. Often our identities are formed in opposition against others. And that means that claiming an identity, and seeking opportunity for ourselves as part of a given identity, means that we have given enemies. As someone who feels pretty proud about my own heritage, and does not feel the need to apologize to others about historical behavior, I am automatically the enemy of those who seek to abuse the powers of government to right historical wrongs by creating present injustices. And these are serious problems, problems that do not cease because we are no longer high school students. If anything, they become worse, because we did not learn better that our glory comes from being created in the image and likeness of God, not because we are members of one group or another. And because we learn the wrong lessons and run with them, our drama and conflict never ends, because we never cease to see others as the “other” rather than as our brothers and sisters with the same heavenly Father. And until we learn, we will have the same patterns of oppression and injustice wherever we turn, only changing the identities that are cherished and favored and those which suffer injustice and oppression. Surely we can do better than that.