Have you experienced not believing a piece of news because of the person who relayed it? A news item may seem incredible but if the news bearer is trustworthy, or he is an influential or popular personality, or someone know and respected in the community, it is usually easy for us to believe the news.
I also find myself incredulous and obstinate in accepting as true a news account coming from a person of questionable character or a person without credibility.
In our present world, we unconsciously ostracize other people because our values, beliefs and traditions are different from them. There is a strong human tendency to judge people by the labels society gives. Most of the time we impose on other people what we want them to be because they are not like us.
In our life, how often do we accuse and condemn others without even listening to their side? Is it because we always think that we know the truth better than anybody else? Wasn’t it said, “Don’t judge the book by its cover!” well, our prejudices and biases often prevent us from seeing the beauty, the greatness and potentials of the person before us.
A very common source of our prejudices is our own upbringing. As we were growing up, we might have been told that such and such a person was worth trustworthy or not. Isn’t it about time to review this and correct whatever mis-education we have had? It is most urgent for all of us to examine ourselves and purge the biases that do not allow us to see others in a better light and thus blocking us from treating them in a civil manner as we ought to.
We must always remember that every wrong thing that we see in others has an equivalent in ourselves. Thus, everytime we judge, we condemn our own selves. So we have to stop applying a measuring stick to other people; for at least there is one more dimension, which we know nothing about, in every person’s life situation.
Ayan, having letting off steam, thus do I vow to no longer get affected or else I would be no different. Pero that’s the thing with prejudice and hate, it’s a mystery whether the best course of action would be really to turn the other cheek. Perhaps this is why so many people are abused unjustly, whether physically, verbally, emotionally, professionally, is because nobody fights back against the abuse and the abuser, to go by behaviorist theory, receives positive reinforcement for the wrong he/she has done and gets conditioned to continue doing it.
It’s a confusing world.