Op-Ed: Is the best of all possible worlds left-handed?

Not way back, I used to be at a gathering when a colleague started to take notes. As I watched her clasp a pen in her left hand, I couldn’t assist myself. “Ah,” I mentioned, “one other lefty” — as if we had been each members of a particular membership.

In a way, after all, that’s true; left-handed individuals make up about 10% of the inhabitants, though we’ve additionally had 5 of the final 9 U.S. presidents. And it’s not solely within the Oval Workplace the place we stand out. Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Winston Churchill, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oprah Winfrey, Babe Ruth and Jimi Hendrix — all are lefties who’ve performed an outsize position.

As to why that is, there are a selection of theories, starting from how we course of data (“Whereas virtually all right-handers course of language solely within the left hemisphere,” the New York Occasions has reported, “about half of all left-handers have language facilities in each side of the mind”) to the hurdles lefties have to beat. Being left-handed means adapting to a world constructed for righties; from faculty desks to fountain pens to notebooks, from sporting a watch to stringing a guitar. Once I was a child, my father — additionally a lefty — taught me to bat right-handed, as he too had been inspired to do when he was rising up. As for fielding, don’t get me began on the restricted choices, in that period no less than, for left-handed baseball gloves.

For me, left-handedness has at all times been a badge of honor. It’s a trait I’m happy to share with my dad. Maybe the one remorse I’ve about my kids is that each are right-handed; I really feel as if I’ve let down the aspect. When he was a boy, my grandfather was retrained to make use of his proper hand — he ended up ambidextrous — and in elementary faculty, there have been by no means a couple of or two of us. Being a lefty, then, has at all times felt unique, like an figuring out model.

Society, nonetheless, has typically thought of it in another way. Historically, lefties have been derided as unreliable, even suspect. The phrase “sinister” comes from “sinestra,” which in Latin means “left.” In sure cultures the place the left hand is used for private hygiene, it is named “the unclean hand.”

After which, after all, there’s politics, wherein, relying the place you sit alongside the ideological spectrum, “left” takes on one other complete set of contingencies. Over the last a number of election cycles, as partisanship has turn into super-ionized, we’ve seen the phrase thrown round like some form of slur. I flinch each time I hear it used that manner, as if it represented a direct assault.

Partially, that’s due to my dominant hand, and partially due to how I vote. I’m certainly, a political lefty, dedicated to variety, fairness and inclusion, to immigration reform and same-sex marriage, to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. I do know loads of right-handers who share these values; how may I not, given their majority? All the identical, I take a particular delight within the hyperlink between the hand I take advantage of and the beliefs I maintain, as if this represented an alignment of my physique with my soul.

Throughout this month’s midterm elections, Individuals in lots of jurisdictions — together with loads of independents and apparently some Republicans — leaned left, or left sufficient, to assist forestall the anticipated “pink Republican wave” from swamping us all. As a lot as I’d wish to suppose this represents the start of an ideological shift, I’ll accept appreciating the just-in-time emergence of an affordable voters.

As for me, I’ve been on that aspect from the outset. I made a selection about the place I stand and what I imagine way back.

A minimum of I believe I made the selection. In keeping with a 2009 Stanford College research, “The way in which we work together with the bodily world impacts our judgments.” The research didn’t correlate bodily asymmetry with political opinions but it surely did conclude that “righties have a tendency to guage objects on their proper aspect as constructive and objects on their left aspect as unfavourable. Lefties do the alternative.”

Does this recommend we want extra lefties? Maybe in a Panglossian better of all attainable worlds. In the true world, although, I’ll take belief in our elections and respect for a girl’s proper to decide on. If that sounds left, so be it; it’s solely frequent sense to me.

What I imply is that at this second in our historical past, we may do loads worse than to embrace our personal left-handed tendencies.

David L. Ulin is a contributing author to Opinion.