The Ugly Truth: Abstract
We cherish what is beautiful, strive to find it and hold it dear for ourselves. Beautiful clothes, beautiful art, beautiful cities, and beautiful people.
To look in the mirror and be thin enough and young enough to say: I am beautiful.
Our love of beauty blinds us, making us unable and unwilling to empathize. We use our love of beauty as a tool to distinguish the good from the bad. The worthy from the useless. We use it as a tool to justify punishing those who we do not deem beautiful.
Like many, I will never forget where I was when I heard the Notre Dame was burning. For a moment, all time stood still as this structure synonymous with Paris, was steadily becoming ash. The outcry was enormous. People from all over the western world came together, throwing our money to save this beautiful structure. Countless people who had no connection to Paris whatsoever hurled millions, and for what? For the cultural importance of course. To save the beauty of Paris. For its history, for its immeasurable worth, the priceless cost of saving something beautiful. I should note, there was in fact a measurable cost, 800 million dollars which was promptly raised in a matter of two days.
From schoolyard bullies picking on the ugly kid to war and mass destruction, conscious or not, we measure devastation by beauty. Ukraine is destroyed, a tragic loss of a beautiful country. Hundreds of years of history gone in a second. Beautiful blonde babies, displaced, forced to flee to the rest of Europe.
Aleppo Syria, an ancient city bustling with markets and glowing lights, completely destroyed along with the rest of its country; thousands of years of history decimated to rubble. Millions displaced, one million killed. But do you remember where you were when it started? Do you think about all that is beautiful which is lost?
It’s important in moments like these that we look in the mirror, the same mirror that tells us our skin is dull and our waist is too big, and ask ourselves why we wait for hours to see the Pantheon, but don’t think twice about the entire ancient city of Damascus. It’s important to ask who tells us what’s beautiful, who tells us what’s not.
