Dear Editor,
Differences between people can be significant, from self identified gender differences, differences in age, culture, language, interests, work, income, personal ambitions to say nothing of physical or political differences.
Human beings though transcend these differences daily, in small and large ways despite periods of misunderstanding, confusion, even conflict, and continue to form relationships despite our differences.
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Many of our differences form part of our identity. They are qualities we are aware of in ourselves and qualities we value about who we are. And yet to regard some of these differences as superior to those of others and to expect others to place due deference to these, is to assume a sense of entitlement, privilege and condescension.
By its very nature that attitude repudiates the value others have in contributing to social and political issues and solutions.
To make judgments about others without knowing them to a significant degree, I suggest, is part of our unconscious and perhaps our deep reptilian responses of fighting and fleeing in the face of something we regard as unfamiliar, foreign or strange.
The more relevant issue though is whether we want to learn about the world around us, where difference is the defining wonder of all of life, of human beings as well as other living organisms on earth. Or whether we want to confine ourselves to things we already know and believe where we regard curiosity about the world to be potentially hazardous to both life and limb.
George Jason