“Don’t judge me
You could be me in another life
In another set of circumstances.” – Tomorrow We’ll See
The first time I heard this song, I was only twelve. It was about a prostituted woman. A little glimpse into a night in her life. All those years ago, God still knew what kind of a heart I had. A heart that could imagine. A heart wanted to understand. When I played this song for my mother for the first time, she became visibly stern. She was not hesitant in refuting the song’s message, not in anger but in the simple matter-of-fact way – a blend of preaching and logic – handed down by her own influences, religious norms that still exist today. To this day, I still remember her words. “Emily, those women are on the street because they want to be. They make that choice.”
This message was reinforced throughout the years through other tropes from Evita to pregnant teenagers. A black and white world with little consideration to the millions of gray contributing factors in ones background that influences our choices. The same mentality extended to the homeless and people with mental illnesses like depression. Obviously, much in our family has changed thanks to a variety of situations, not all of them positive.
Though a small portion of Sting’s song is not accurate I.e “You ask what future do I see, I say it’s really up to me…” because denial is an integral part of the prostituted/trafficked woman’s life as well as being inured to it, and of course…the fervent belief that one is in control – a survival mechanism to cope through the daily grind of degradation and abuse.
But the main message of “don’t judge me” should *sting* each and every one of us. Judging has become a point of controversy in our culture, viewed as black and white. You are allowed to judge or allowed to be tolerant. When there should be a balance between these. For those on the judging side, how can you say you would do something different? How can you say anyone’s choices are their own if you have not walked a mile in their shoes? When you weren’t raised with her parents or single parent or single parent with stepparent or boyfriend? How can you say you would behave differently if you weren’t raised in poverty, experienced homelessness, abuse, family dysfunction early in life that negated steady feelings of security?
All too often, people are shaped by their experiences and they believe that if they made a certain choice in one situation, then anyone can make the same choices in another situation, even if we are all different with varying degrees of influence and environments. But perhaps we can take a lesson from Sting. Choose for just the duration of a song perhaps to peek into another person’s life, to glimpse what they have experienced. Not in a goal to judge nor to sit back and permit ourselves to do nothing. Perhaps if we can all just try to understand, and in understanding, we might empathize, and in empathizing, we might show a little love. And as another infamous songwriter penned…”what the world needs now…”