July 5, 2006
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Becoming a Racist
I won’t say the word “everyone” as this is my journal, so I will say “I”.
I was born innocent. I was born trusting. I was born fragile, loving, and optimistic.
Thanks to my family and the sunny, tropical environments I grew up in,
I am still very much a child. I did not know what marijuana smelled and
looked like until 3 years ago. It still amazes me to hear about gangs,
or murder, or war.Do you believe that suffering builds character?Would I be who I am today had I not
suffered all I have? Sometimes, I think I would be a Better Person if I
had stayed Naive. Then, I would not be so suspicious of others and
things called Ulterior Motives.But the more I interact with the world, the more obvious it becomes
that there are very few people worthy of breathing, and fewer people
worthy of being a Friend.People lie to me. They think that because we are strangers, they can
get away with it. And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people
lying. I will tolerate – maybe even admire – a skillful liar who lies
for the hell of it, not to gain anything, but just because. But those
that lie to save a few dollars, those that lie to build a wall of
ignorance, those that lie to gain a small measure of power from having
me believe them – those are the ones I arrogantly judge as not having
the right to breathe the same air as me.To say something is to make it real, to make it True. And to say
otherwise than what Is – that’s like matter and anti-matter meeting,
and it is the private destruction of integrity.Someone once told me that the only thing worth having in the world is
Land – because it’s the only thing Permanent. Yes, it is. But the only
thing worth having in yourself is Integrity – your Word, your Belief,
your Vault of Understanding in which you place the sacred thing that
people give you – their Trust.When I was born, there were many things that made me stand out from the
crowd, like being the heaviest baby ever born in that hospital. But I
was born one with the world: I was innocent, I was trusting, I was fragile, loving and optimistic.The more people I meet, though, the more that changes.
Comments (3)
i think as a child you do not have a choice to be those things. but i also believe that as an adult we have those choices. we can choose to be jaded and cynical, or we can choose to say, hey crap happens, but i don’t have to be a part of it. if you let one thing get to you, you let all things get to you. life is life, and there’s not escaping it.
Words like betrayal, fraud, and murder all came about because they’re part of the way people actually behave. But words like love, loyalty, and honor exist, too. I think of it as being a big spectrum of what kind of human you can choose to be. Don’t focus too much on the negative, lest that limit your perspective to be all that you can see.
Oh, and no, suffering doesn’t build character. But it does seem to purchase maturity (at least for some people).
being exposed to lies does make our worlds more complex…