Prejudice... “An unfavorable opinion or feeling formed before hand or without knowledge, thought, or reason” –Dictionary.com
I would like to believe that humanity would never do this on purpose. People actually thinking and speaking on something they know nothing about, holding themselves on a pedestal and believing that what they are, who they are and how they are… is any better than someone else. Because, after all, what you believe to be true may be completely different than another merely because of the different paths you have taken in life. To me it is that easily explained triggering the much debated question… how can we not all see this? How can we not all know that there is no right way, there is only what we know which is completely different than what our neighbor knows… so there is no right or wrong, just different. Simple right?
Prejudice, to me, is a word that invokes udder sadness. A word of unconscious hate, a word that limits someone’s ability to see the world as it actually is… full of lives that are beautiful, colorful, alive, and thriving. As we grow and change, our eyes open to new ideas. I believe that when you have a deep rooted prejudice, sometimes it is hard for yourself to see. We get stuck on a course that keeps you from thinking outside of what you normally do. We go to the same places and talk to the same people, stay close to what we know in order to feel safe. It is when we are not careful of this complacent state of existence, that our learned behaviors can become prejudices.
To be able to learn new cultural ways of thinking is the key to keeping this world a world free of prejudice. There are billions of us on the planet.. But as DeGenova puts it so well “Imagine what it would be like if the whole world were populated by people just like you”. The travelling I have done has only begun to open my eyes to the vast amount of cultures there are to learn about. I want to see it all, strip myself of any prejudices that I may have, hold myself accountable for every thought and every emotion that I have and be conscious of each one of them. This world is so much bigger than the United States of America. Every day billions of people on this planet live such extremely, astonishingly, incredibly and mind-bogglingly different lives. With each story completely matchless, with each story having the possibility that it could have been you, how could we ever hold an “unfavorable opinion or feeling" about someone's story?
