The cycle of prejudice moves from one group to another never solving the problem, just moving it.
Revenge is what’s on everybody’s mind, not growth and progress.
Prejudice doesn’t happen in a vacuum without willing participants at some level of engagement.
I’ve seen it happen in affordable housing. Management begins to take liberties for their own convenience and eventually the tenants stop caring. “Ah so what, I don’t care, let them do what they want, it doesn’t bother me, they’ll do it anyway” until the actual violations by management for their own convenience get written into the lease agreement, putting the company’s conveniences above the tenants’ privacy rights.
It happens all the time. A few people don’t care about their rights and allow management to do as they please when they please, then next thing you know, there are no rights and the tenants become slaves to the conveniences of management.
It’s what they can get away with.
Then when laws are being passed there are always present those who will argue that the tenants don’t care, the fruit pickers don’t care, the slaughterhouse workers don’t care, really, it’s all those activists who care, who are making money stirring up trouble where there is none.
That’s about the way it goes. Next thing you know an entire segment of a population is being discriminated against and then there’s war, created by a chaos that could have been prevented.
It takes two to tango is appropriate. One must stay vigilant without becoming a vigilante on the rights that slowly slip away, many times by our own doing. There will always be someone, some group looking to exploit others and if you drop your guard you get exploited.
It’s not enough to say, well they shouldn’t do that. Maybe we shouldn’t let them. We should be able to trust people, but the reality is we can’t trust blindly, or give in to what doesn’t matter so much to us anyway, when we’re too weary to oppose.
What we’re saying is okay with us, may not be okay with a lot of others, especially when the exploitation gets woven into our cultures. “Oh, let the boys have it”. Next thing you know sexism is born. We can’t fight every battle. But we don’t have to give in every time.
Apathy is what the exploiters look for and it’s not difficult to find. People are weary and the exploiters know it.
Another example: There’s a news story or two or three citing China as the origin of the coronaCOVIDvirus. Wuhan wet/warm markets, selling animals freshly slaughtered without benefit of refrigeration and sanitation procedures, and not far away from a scientific lab set up to test and experiment with viruses.
Viruses that originate in animals.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the world would be in an uproar. In fact, there really wasn’t much of an uproar, but sometimes these things need to settle in before they begin to fester when not appropriately addressed to allay one’s fears about contamination and the spread of deadly viruses.
So instead of addressing the issue in a thoughtful, accurate and concerned way, the media jumped on anyone who criticized China, simply wanting explanations, which by the way were not forthcoming. It was easier to accuse anyone who questioned China’s role in the spreading of the virus, a racist and then set about destroying the person who dared ask questions and raise concerns.
So now the media and the governments that control the media developed an Asian hate campaign to root out any people who might be seen as hating Asians by talking about the issues regarding their contribution to this pandemic.
That’s how some prejudices are born, by not being able to discuss openly one’s concerns/fears about what someone else is doing without being struck down for it, especially when it has a death sentence attached and can strike anywhere, anytime.
The media over-reacted to valid concerns people have by calling them racists to shut them up. Next thing you know, there’s war, created by a chaos that could have been prevented.
The dialogue should have been about shutting down those markets, no matter where they exist. Instead it was about creating racists out of those who wanted to get to the root of the problem and fix it. That never happened. The wet markets didn’t get shut down. Making racists out of anyone who cared enough to verbalize their concerns didn’t solve anything. It created chaos.
WORD WARRIOR DAVIES-TIGHT™ 