Discriminate

Human nature is to blame for all our discrimination and selfish acts, not society. Someone once said, "We discriminate, because at a young age we were already taught to pick out differences." Our teacher taught us to pick out the blue box in a set of red and yellow balls. Or we chose the green triangle in a set of black diamonds. Then our early and innocent minds associated this exercise with society and picking out differences among people and races and soon, we learned to discriminate and even hate on those who are different. And this person said we needed to ignore that. Well, he was very convincing, I'll give him that. I even started to believe it. Until I thought more about it later at lunch. And it's not society teaching us to hate differences. It's not at all their fault. It's not even remotely close to a side effect of teachers teaching us to be observant of what's different and same. It's our human nature. It's us. It's that deeply rooted idea inside of us that leads us to want to be with people we are similar to, that nature that pulls us closer to those that are like us. That nature? Human nature. It's a survival mechanism. We stray from those that are different because we are afraid. We are afraid of differences because we don't know if they think like us, talk like us, if they are in any way like us. So instead of showing fear, back in the day, we strove to overcome it by being bigger. We strove for that "Eat or be Eaten" motto. We are afraid of the risks of associating with things different from us. So we turned that fear into anger and that anger to hate and that hate to... indescribable acts of inhumanity.

Well now maybe we have taken this a bit far and we have indeed strayed from what our instincts old us. We were inept back then. We didn't know better. But now, we DO know differences in appearances don't make for differences in the heart, mind and soul. We may disagree, but there are fundamentals we all share. Beyond just feeding and sleeping into our emotions intentions and thoughts. To say we need to stop hating and unteach ourselves to dislike difference is to say we need to go against our natural mechanisms. But we do need to stop the hate. We need to stop hating because we now understand that differences don't make us different, unknown and terrifying creatures. We do share 99% of our genes, so how much closer do you need to be to not be afraid?