This has been on my mind for days now. When I grew up, in my family, we were taught that all people were humans and deserved respect and kindness. Yes, people dressed funny or acted different or were different colors, but basically we were all the same. We were all God's children.
And I feel that my siblings and I all grew up with a healthy, perhaps naïve at times, view of the world. There were people who spat upon us, cursed us, here or there, because we were a different religion but I knew in my heart that we were all basically good and worthy and the same.
However, after some incidences, I did grow up with a profound fear that if people found out my religion, it would color their view of me. I did hold this fear of people who thought we were different and chose to focus on how we were all the same and often hid my religion. My "husband," whose family was wiped out in a concentration camp during WWII, is totally detached from his religion.
There are people who assume things about people because they identify with a group, but as we say assuming something is "making an ass of u and me."
Today, we seem to be highly focused on our differences instead of our sameness, so much so that people are creating laws to take away people's humanness, bombing babies with no deference to their life. In the last 50 years, we have worked hard to accept people and their differences as a country, as one under a higher power or of a spiritual realm, or whatever you call "God." I have witnessed it with the black movement and the women's movement, both of which seem to be in a backslide now.
Now, differences have come to the surface, and everyone needs acknowledgement for who they are or choose to be. I get that! And I seriously get that everyone deserves the same rights and freedoms as others. Maybe we have to rub things in people's faces to come to the understanding that people are people and babies are babies and not everything is as "black and white" as we want it to be, but we are all human. Let's not forget! Look at Ukraine! It is another perverse example to the extreme that we need to accept people for who they are and live and let live.
You can't say that being one thing is okay but being another is not unless you are talking about crimes and murder. Hate is learned. And we cannot group whole groups as one thing, except humans with flesh and blood and feelings of love and hurt and anger. We need to accept our sameness first. Our differences are secondary. Again, acceptance is the key. If we are to survive, we must accept and respect our rights and the rights of others as one!