Children at Play

So, one day in last year I was walking home from an 'institution' (I won't call it a school, more like a fly by night organization, designed around fooling rich parents into feeling that they're providing their kids with the education they didn't receive when they had the chance in college, which further makes me wonder how I ended up there, but anyway) that I was attending at the time (but not for much longer), depressed as I was for most of that period (which lasted for years), when I noticed that I was passing a daycare center, and there were some children at play on those things that stick in the ground, and they can hold on to it, and run around, or ride on it (don't know the name of it...). There was a white kid, a black kid, an indian, chinese (you wonder how I can tell just by looking, well, come to Jamaica and find out :D) just a bunch of different nationalities all playing together on this thing, with several others playing in the background.

I stood up there watching them, and I had an epiphany (late as usual). I realized that all of our prejudices, our biases and racial snobberies are learned. All of it. This came as quite a shock, but in that instant it made perfect sense. I was seeing it right in front of me. All these different children, none of them recognizing ANYTHING in the other children excepting their status as fellow children, and hence their status as equals, and playmates, with no restraint or complications. I watched as a muslim child chased what looked like a chinese girl and a dark skinned boy, falling over them and laughing. I was suddenly, immensely and not surprisingly (gah, Stephen King would have a fit at that phrase) sad. All the light and colour went out of the scene I was watching, and I had to leave, or I would have stood up there and cried. I went on my way, my heart that much heavier.

Why, you ask? Think about it. In a few years, they will be old enough to begin to recognize and assimilate all the unkind things that their parents and older friends/siblings say about people of different ethnicities. They will begin to think about these things, and more often than not they will accept them (children are sponges, and they soak up everything they see, here and interact with, especially from and with those they consider important, such as family members and friends, and people that they are aware that the family members acknowledge and hold in esteem, all of this being done subconsciously, of course), and they will begin to color their perception of the world and the people they know and come into contact with everyday. They will begin to see them as not equals, but as they are represented to them, by the aforementioned individuals, as well as their society at large. They will begin to fit them into the molds that we all know, and this will forever change their relationships with these people. They will begin to judge them before they even know them, and this would have been just one more symptom of the end of their innocence, and the world at large will quietly have lost another battle with all that is wrong with it.

*sigh*

So I just kept walking, and as I walked I looked at the people in their cars, and the people on the roadside, and I peered into stores, shops, and all the other buildings I passed on the way home (it's a good little walk, trust me) and I wondered about all these people. I wondered if any of them were aware of what they'd lost, all without their knowledge or consent. Hell, I'd lost it long ago, and I think I was relatively well aware of its passing (or would like to delude myself that I was), and I still couldn't do jack about it. It starts small, and no one really notices it, but one day you're talking about someone, and you make a joke where the person's ethnicity is the butt of the joke, or maybe its just a rude or sly comment, and that's it. No one flinches, as you're simply stating what those around you are already thinking (as this is what they were socialized to think as well), or, if they do, you probably refrain from saying whatever it was around them again (but you don't stop thinking it). Either way, you are well on your way to being a closet racist.

Oh, I'm sorry, didn't hear what I said?

Let me repeat that. You are a closet racist. All of you (me included). Its natural, it happens to us all, and it cannot be helped. Lemme explain, however, before I'm lynched (and wouldn't that be the heights of irony.......or maybe it would be the depths...?), what exactly it is that I mean. We all have preformed notions of what someone from our ethnicity, or from others, will be like (and if you deny that, then you have your own issues to deal with, there). Black people are lazy, Indians always are looking for/offering a bargain, White people are arrogant, snotty, ignorant assholes, so on and so forth (I mean to insult no one, just using them as illustrations, but I'm probably gonna get in trouble anyway, more's the pity). We all have different versions of these things floating around in our heads, and they were put there in part by our own experiences with different members of these ethnicities, but in a greater part by the things we've absorbed over our lifetime, from our society and the media at large, and in our homes. This has been done to us, and we're gonna do it to our kids, and so on and so forth, and the cycle stretches to the horizon and beyond. It is a sad thing to think about, but it cannot be denied.

Why bring this up, you ask?

I don't know, I just felt like putting it down here, and getting it out of my system. I look at the world today, and I see this enormous mess of a playground filled with self-centered children, all of them squabbling over and amongst their little corners of the playground, hoarding their lunches and treats, possessing waaaay more food and toys than they could possibly use themselves, whilst most of the others are getting by on eating dirt (and the occasional worm), and having to share the same sets of sticks and rocks, looking on in envy and a kind of bitter hope, one that knows it will not be fulfilled, but exists anyway, as hoping is an essential, necessary and undeniable part of being a human being. They play at being grown ups, stomping around in shoes and clothes that are too big for them, aping the grown ups they know, using big words, but resorting to tantrums and fist fights, stone throwing (and more serious measure still) at the least provocation. They appoint 'yes men' to a 'council' that seems to meet solely to hear the sounds of their own voices, smile for their teachers, and waste each other's and their respective corners of the playground's time and money convincing each other how effective they are, and just how good a job they're doing maintaining and managing the playground, while it becomes dirtier and more disorganized and inhospitable with each passing day.

*sigh*

I find it hard to hope when I think of that playground, the one that the world is today, and I think of the playground that we all started out on, and then I think of the fact that we've been here for thousands of years, and in all this time we have simply been unable to get this right? I find it hard to hope, when I think about this world, in that light.



...but I hope nonetheless.



What the **** else am I supposed to do?


"Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness." - The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded.

Waiting on the World to Change - John Mayer, Continuum.