So, I was born with an oft envied, sometimes admired tan. I’m brown skinned. And then there are the whites and the blacks. And the yellow skinned. And the Asians, the Europeans, the Latinos, the Africans, the Aussies and I’m not really sure if there are the Greenlanders and the Antarcticans and all!
Oh I get it. It’s the visual factor. Fat people are looked down upon and ridiculed, the gawky, social butter-fingers are written off as losers, those on the extremes of the physical/visual spectrum are labeled freaks and so on and so forth.
Hmmm. On second thoughts, maybe not. How would that justify the violence that stems from the most cruel and hurtful, the mother-lode of all the forms discrimination manifests itself amongst us – racial discrimination? How would that justify the hard glint of hatred in cold, angry eyes when they mutilate and kill their fellow human beings in the name of religion and race? Is that how far are they willing to go to justify (or is it to earn?) the sense of “belonging”? I am prone to think that it can only be a person, who after innumerable unsuccessful attempts to find within one’s self any kind of fulfillment or sense of accomplishment or self-worth if I may, that clings with dear life to such notions of hatred and superiority.
I know. Countless articles, books, whitepapers etc. have been written on the “phenomenon”(?). This is my rant, my personal venting. Yesterday a dear friend confided in me the disappointment that stems from a rude shock to the belief system as a consequence of being sheltered and in denial so long. That this is the land of opportunities, that one who toils the hardest, reaps the most. Reaps the harvest of reward and of Respect.
Discrimination. The “D” word. Must it haunt us, from within our nation and without? By virtue of skin colour, of caste, of social status, of language, of geography, of wealth, of all those myriads of totally despicable reasons that never fail to gross me out.
For now all I can think is, when i have a family, if I can make my kids as oblivious to all this gungho crap as I was growing up, I can probably hope to have made my tiny contribution to making this world a little better. I Hope.
current song
A Hundred Years by
Five for Fighting