Beneath the Categories

August 15, 2026

Years ago, I participated in an Urban Search and Rescue training.

One day, one of the instructors asked the group:

“Do you feel like you’re different from everyone else?”

He wasn’t speaking directly to anyone, but somehow, I felt as though he was speaking to me.

I remember that moment now and wonder why we human beings have such a need to place one another into categories.

Male or female.
Rich or poor.
Young or old.
Educated or uneducated.
Important or ordinary.

And then we create categories within categories until eventually we seem to have constructed an entire filing system for humanity.

Perhaps categories help us make sense of a complicated world. There is nothing inherently wrong with noticing differences. The problem begins when we mistake the category for the person.

We begin to think that because someone belongs to a particular group, we already know something about who they are, what they can do, how they should behave, or where they belong.

And when someone doesn’t fit neatly into the box we have prepared for them, we sometimes look at them as though they have three heads.

There is something almost comical about remembering this in the context of Search and Rescue.

Imagine arriving at a collapsed building and deciding that the women should be rescued first because the men are stronger and can probably survive longer.

Or rescuing the wealthy first because perhaps they will give you a reward.

Or rescuing the adults before the children because children are supposed to be more resilient.

It sounds absurd because it is.

When people are trapped beneath rubble, most of the categories we use to separate ourselves suddenly become remarkably unimportant.

The questions become different.

Who needs help most urgently?

Who can be reached?

Who can be saved?

What can we do?

A collapsed building has little regard for our social hierarchies. Concrete does not become lighter because someone is wealthy. A person’s title cannot breathe for them. Status cannot stop bleeding.

Underneath the rubble is simply another human being.

Perhaps there is something in that image worth remembering even when no building has collapsed.

Because we spend much of our lives constructing invisible structures around one another.

Labels.
Assumptions.
Expectations.
Roles.
Status.
Ideas about who someone should be because of the group we have placed them in.

Layer after layer.

Until sometimes we can barely see the person underneath.

Maybe there is another kind of Search and Rescue we are called to practice.

Not digging through concrete and steel, but through everything we have been taught to assume about one another.

Perhaps if we remove enough of that rubble, eventually we arrive at something far simpler than all the categories we created.

A human being.

And perhaps the first question was never meant to be:

What are you?

Perhaps it has always been:

Are you there?

And beneath everything we have piled upon one another, the answer remains:

I’m here.