Every once in a while, I notice something on social media that just makes me shake my head. I understand that we all have inherent prejudices and that anyone that denies that simple fact is, well, simple minded. I don’t critique it as much as I attempt to understand what it is I see because a lot of what I view plays into my own prejudices. When I see something that just doesn’t add up though, I stop and think about it, and sometimes, I’m compelled to scratch out a few words here.

Our prejudices are self imposed. I used to think they were familial or socially inherited and some of that is true but I think more, nowadays, we become who we are based on what we, ourselves, contribute to our civil society. there’s other much that’s strange anymore like it was for our ancestors: Technology has seen to that so it really can’t be an excuse. As when my father was a kid and saw a black man for the first time (during the depression in the 1930’s) and had to ask his own dad what was wrong with that man. Imagine never having been exposed to another race or ethnicity, or even religion. The idea of that today seems foreign to us. Most of us.

And yet, the educated, 21st century western mind can still come up with ways to show the petty mindedness that the rest of the world sees on a daily basis and we, the lunatic west, can’t find a mirror where we at least expose ourselves to the ugliness that we perpetrate on ourselves, and others that we share this world with as well. We should not be making comparisons where none should exist. There is that need to show ourselves to be superior to others based on immutable characteristics as well as those that may vary culturally.

In the long view, will we ever be able to change? the present looks better than even our recent past so it is possible that we humans learn from at least our most egregious mistakes towards each other but the end game being that prejudice becomes a bad memory, like a disease inoculated out of existence? We’ll see.