Prejudice

All my life I have never understood prejudice. I have never understood the act of hating someone simply because they are different. Racism? Nope, don't get it. Anti-Semitism? Well, being that my mother was Jewish and I was raised celebrating both Jewish and Christian holidays that would be a "No" as well. Don't get it. Gender discrimination? One of my pet peeves. Having my period once a month is enough to prove I can handle just as much pain as a man can. And yes, men can cook...and clean...and be good with children. Most of them can do it better that I can. Crazy. I know. Hating people for they're sexuality...I have a lot of gay friends, and I'm bisexual so you figure that one out. Basically, I just flat out did not understand discrimination when I was growing up. I would see it. I would see people with different colored skin acting nasty to each other. I would see overweight people having a hard time finding cute clothes. I would see people avoid the mentally handicapped like the plague. I would see pictures of girls wearing hardly any clothes on the cover of every magazine, yet found nothing that objectified men in the same way. When I was 8 my family and I came back from a trip to Disney World to find our house covered in spray paint graffiti saying "Fuck Jews!" "Go Home Jews!" and drawings of swastikas all over our house. It was right there in front of me, but still, I didn't get. And I didn't want to get it. I figured that whoever filled up the emptiness of their lives with pointless, bitter hate didn't deserve to be understood.
Ironically that's where my own prejudice stemmed from. My parents were never very clear or forceful about which religion they wanted my brother and me to follow, because they didn't really believe in it themselves. They believed in God, believed that something was watching over us, believed that though we had control in our own lives, sometimes life was just in fate's hands. But we never went to church or temple except for weddings and funerals. We just celebrated a few Jewish and Christian holidays. And while I appreciated the freedom of this, as I grew older, I found myself lost. My mother died when I was 13 years old. When she was alive it was more than enough for her and my dad to say that God was watching over us. It didn't matter which God, just so long as something good was out there. But when my mom died that left me bitter and questioning everything I had ever known. I suddenly felt that if there were a god he/she would never have let this happen. So I numbed myself and told myself that I believed in nothing. In the meantime, I met many Christians, who strongly opposed my viewpoints, such as Pro-choice or just being a Jew. Their opinions and beliefs were often thrust upon me, which I didn't appreciate, but went along with for a while because I didn't know what else to do. I went to a few of their youth groups but instantly felt even more lost and out of place than I had before. This was not what I was searching for either. I realized that I didn't believe in nothing, and I definitely wasn't a true Christian either. I mean people kept telling me that I was responsible for killing their lord some thousand years ago. Mean while I was about 15, I wasn't interested in killing anybody, at this point in my life I just wanted to read my teen magazines, dream of becoming a wildly famous pop-star and hopefully find out just what the Hell I was looking for.
When I was 18 I moved to the city to sell my soul and become famous. I started feeling numb again. It didn't help that everyone around me was at least 2 years older and already a bit hardened from the city and other worldly travels. Well, what I found in the end, after about a year of being there, was this: It was all such bullshit. I was never going to be as skinny/pretty/socialite-ish as I needed to be to make it in this town. I was not one of the few lucky people who could live in the city and strive to be a famous actress while still retaining my sanity and my conscience. The homeless people that I used to feel for so much I now didn't even make eye contact with. My new attitude was "they're probably fakes or alcoholics anyway" so I grew even colder. I knew it was time for a change before I lost myself completely.
So I moved back home to Long Island to take a year off to rediscover myself. Find out who I was, who I wanted to be, and how to get from point A to point B. Now, a little over a year later, I feel a lot more like myself. No more starving myself to be thin, no more wearing boots and heels all the time. No more schmoozing with people I don't even like. No more ridiculous acting methods. No more "starving" for my "art". No more dramatic bullshit. Just me, the beach, some good, down to earth people, and a community college, where I'm re-learning what I had completely forgotten since my mom died; I'm really smart. And I'm really strong. And that's so much more important than being pretty. I still haven't figured out exactly what religion I am yet, but I do know that more than anything else, I believe in the power of Mother Nature and the universe. I believe that something more powerful than I am is out there, I just don't know what. I adopted my mother and father's "hippie" values, believing that all humans are equal, that the power of love is more important than the love of power, and that the world does not belong to us, we belong to the world. Hate is futile, and we should be using our intelligence to form loving alliances, not needless hate groups.
Unfortunately, as together as it may seem I have it now, I realized the other day that maybe I need to do even more re-evaluating than I had initially planned. I recently took a trip into the city with my boyfriend, who had never lived there. He saw all the homeless individuals begging for help. He looked at them, looked at me, gave me a puppy face and said "those poor people". He wanted to help. I hadn't given it a second thought. I hadn't even given it a first thought. After living in the city for a year, and seeing these people everyday and knowing I couldn't help all of them, I followed everyone else's attitude which was "I'm just not going to help any of them". I thought they were just scary and homeless. Prejudice. Then the other day I was driving home from school and got stuck in a ton of traffic. I was very frustrated and annoyed, and the driver in front of me was moving very slowly, and had decided to stop at a light as it turned, not red, but yellow. "You had time to make that light!, What are you retarded?!" I thought. Prejudice. And then I saw it. A bumper sticker that had something to do with Christianity. I didn't care what it had to do with Christianity. All I cared about was that now I had real justification to hate this driver in front of me. I remembered losing a close friend over the fact that I didn't believe what she believed. I remembered coming home to a house where my childhood toys were covered in swastikas. I remember being told time and time again that I needed to be "saved" and that I was going to Hell. I saw that bumper sticker, and I remembered these things and it was all I needed to use it against this person, whom I didn't even know. Whose face I couldn't even see. And without even thinking I said it. "Oh, you're a Christian. No wonder. Asshole." At that moment I flashed back to a movie about the discrimination towards blacks in the South. I remembered the way the uneducated, hateful, racist man had called the black man "n*gger". How full of hate. What fire in his eyes. How he didn't even know why he hated this man so much. What, because his skin was a different color? Yet, there it was. That despicable word. "n*gger" And I felt my heart sink. The same way that word had been said in the movie, was the same way I had said the word Christian. So full of prejudice. So full of pointless hate. Prejudice.
I went home that day and I cried. I realized that after this year of advocating that there should be love not hate and that all people were equal, I couldn't even follow my own beliefs. I was just another cause of the all the bad that was in this world. I was bitter. I hated or feared groups of people based a generalized opinion. I had let one or two bad encounters with people who happened to believe in a certain something, or lived a certain way, form my overall opinion on all who shared those views. After "finding myself" and convincing myself that "all you need is love" I found that I was just as filled with hate as everyone else. Something needed to change. And I realized that something was me.
It's been a mere few weeks since this happened and since I came to my realization. I've been trying to empty my mind of all the preconceived notions I have about any group or type of people. I may not be there yet, but I hope the day comes that I can meet someone that has viewpoints completely opposing mine, someone who I should theoretically not be able to get along with at all, and I hope on that day I can say "I don't believe in what you believe in, but maybe you can help me understand". Or better yet "I don't believe in what you believe in, you don't believe in what I believe in. We are totally different. But who cares. Connection comes before opinion. So let's put our opinions aside, and be friends." I pray that maybe someday, the world will see a happy day when difference is embraced, and prejudice is told as a fairytale, or recounted in history books, as a thing of the past.

Prejudice. Pointless.