We All Live in the Same Glass House

prejudice |ˈprejədəs|
noun
1 preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience :

I was kinda sorta trying to avoid this whole topic completely, but since I’m defining words today, I guess I don’t have any choice. Maybe I should go back to school and major in linguistics.

I’m going to tell you a secret, that you may or may not know, but that is a truth, whether you like it or not. You ready? Ok, here goes:

we are all prejudiced.

We are.

There’s nothing you can say that can defend against that statement. We are fallible. We do things for reasons we don’t understand. We are all prejudiced…end of story.

I’m not saying we’re all racist, or sexist, or homophobes, or age-ists. We each carry our own strain of the disease. At the end of the day, we’re all prejudiced, and none of us can hide from that reality.

What brings this up is the story that was broke Monday by my sister by another mister.

This thing made the national news, in a day and age where this kind of stuff is becoming more prevalent, or at least more noted every day.

There’s been much discussion about the story, but at the end of the day, the story is a symptom of the disease.

We, as humans, encounter racist, sexist, PREJUDICED stuff every day, regardless of who or what we are. Shelby County Commissioner Sidney Chism provided some just yesterday, and, in a stretch of irony, he’s the guy that proposed the far reaching Shelby County non-discrimination order. Prejudice is a reality of our world, and our task is to defeat it, not try to make political points off of it.

Prejudice is wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m as guilty of it as anyone. The key question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we trying to get better?”, or “Are we using it to promote a political agenda?”

In the end, we all live in the same glass house. As long as this is a political issue instead of a social issue, we’re throwing stones at ourselves, and ultimately bringing the glass house down around us.

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