Discrimination

Have you ever watch children play? They create some game with a ball or a stick and run around joyfully with each other. They don’t care if the other kid is of their same background or attend the same church or wear the same cloths or even speak the same language. They create their own communication and laugh and run and play and have fun together.

Then one of the parents comes up and says, “No, you can’t play with that child.”

The kid will look puzzled but it was an authoritarian parent that gave the order and being a kid under complete rule of laws pronounced by the overloads of life, you give up playtime and learn the lesson of ‘discrimination’.

Sometimes it starts much earlier.

From the crib everyone you see is the same color. You mime what they do and learn the right and wrong way to walk and talk and worship and learn, surrounded by clones of YOU.

When someone different enters your space of activity, even ever so briefly, you pay special attention to him or her. If he or she talk and walk and act like you they are still aliens from another world.

“Mommy, why is that person different from us?” you may ask and the answer will start you on your road to discrimination.

As you grow up you will learn even more ways to separate yourself from others around you. Even organizations and associations are formed to reinforce your discrimination.

Our books of faith teach love and respect but a few pages later defines the sinners who must smite down. Our politics discriminate into various definitions and are followed as closely as our faith. Our prejudices are fed by those of the same thinking and are passed down to our siblings and offspring.

As generations grow more diverse, whether by choice or by law, the natural assimilation of those who were avoided or worst will question discrimination.

The more you learn, the less you realize you know.