Timothy Birdnow

Chester McAteer observes:

Prejudice is stronger than all principles, though not always stronger than lust.

Tim adds:

Prejudice is a survival trait. It is the human way of coping with potential danger without adequate information. If you see a large man coming and you don't know him you have to rely on patterns that are defensive in nature and that have served you in the past. Probably you will go to the other side of the street or take other actions to protect yourself.

Jesse Jackson said that, that he would be relieved if he heard footsteps behind him and turned around to see it was a white person. Was Jackson just mindlessly prejudiced? No because he had a template from which he was operating, one based on experience and second-hand knowledge.

Now that doesn't mean blind prejudice doesn't exist, or that we should judge a book by it's cover, but it is a natural human characteristic. It goes back to the dawn of Man. "Diversity" is a modern idea, one that flies in the face of human instinct. We resist diversity because we cannot trust those who are too different from ourselves This is hard-wired into us. The trick is to suppress prejudice in everyday life while allowing it to continue to help out under key circumstances - ones where we may be in peril.

Years ago there were two girls who were murdered here in St. Louis. They had been students of my mothers, BtW. In this case these high school girls went onto the long-abandoned Chain of Rocks bridge with their male cousin to show them a poem they had written about acceptance and racial prejudice (ironically). It was night time. They passed a group of young black men on the bridge on their way to the graffiti (this bridge was used in Escape from New York, btw.) Well, the girls never made it home. These men raped them and tossed them off the bridge. They threw the male cousin off too but he survived the fall into the black waters of the Mississippi.

These girls, inculcated with modern thinking about prejudice and not wanting to be "bad people" in their own minds, thought it was safe to pass a group of men on a closed bridge at night. Prejudice should have put some fear in them but they were taught to suppress it completely. Can't be bad people and judge these men now can we?

Tolerance killed those girls. They should have been afraid, even if they men they passed had been white or Asian. You just can't go wandering about on the ruins of bridges at night and trust ANYONE you meet.

Prejudice is a powerful human trait indeed. And it is a good trait if kept in it's proper sphere. We have to make snap decisions on occasion about people based on appearances or behavior. Often our lives depend on it. Again, we need to restrain it in a civil and diverse society, but I don't believe anyone on Earth is free of prejudice nor should they be.

As for lust, it is indeed stronger than prejudice. In fact people have thrown their whole lives away over it. The urge to reproduce is probably the strongest urge we have, next to pure survival.

The story of Samson in the Bible is a great example; he KNEW Delilah was trying to trick him so the Phillistines could defeat him, but he ended up telling her his secret anyway. Just couldn't stop himself.

Now THAT is one hard-up guy!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 597 words, total size 3 kb.