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Today's
quotation:
Those who are
possessed with a prejudice are possessed
with a devil, and one of the worst kinds of devils, for it
shuts out the truth, and often leads to ruinous error.
Tryon Edwards
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Today's
Meditation:
It's so hard to live without prejudices. The
word, of course, refers to "pre-judging," our
tendency to think that certain people will act in certain
ways and do certain things simply because of some trait
that they share with others who we also believe do certain
things or act in certain ways. A member of a certain
race will act in a certain way because, of course,
"all of them act that way." And they act
in ways that we don't like, so therefore we can't like the
people, either. I saw a man with green skin shirking
on the job and saying terrible things about someone else,
so now when I see someone with green skin, I'm going to
know that that person is a lazy worker who says terrible
things.
Black people are this, Chinese people are that, Caucasians
are these. Young people have these problems, old
people have those, women these and men those. We
like to categorize people because it's easier for us, and
we think it protects us in the long run. But coming
up with such silly prejudices helps no one, and actually
causes us to make some of the most significant mistakes in
our lives. Because the next green person that I meet
may be just the person I need to help me in several ways--
but I'm going to reject that person without ever
finding out the great things about him or her because I
already "know" that I'm right.
Sometimes, such knowledge is actually helpful. There
are some neighborhoods into which we shouldn't stray
because there is actually a strong chance that something
bad can happen to us. And often, the people who live
in such neighborhoods belong predominantly to a particular
ethnic or racial group. But the problems in that
neighborhood cannot and should not be extended outside of
it-- not everyone of that particular ethnicity or race can
be judged based on what happens in one small geographic
area. We know something about a place and some
people who live in that place-- but that doesn't mean we
know anything about others who share the ethnicity, skin
color, religion, national origin, or language of the
people of that place.
It's easy to prejudge. We think we know something
important, and we want to apply it to people we don't
know. But we really shouldn't do so because it's not
fair to the people we're judging, and it's not fair to
us. We want to build an inclusive world, not an
exclusive one, and the more prejudice we show, the more
exclusion we practice.
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