I have many, many biases. Do you? You probably do. In fact, we all do. I don’t like certain types of food. I don’t like certain types of colors, and I don’t like certain types of cultures, people. These were the biases I grew up with probably from a very early age, but I would like to share several stories that have happened to me along my travels over the years. The most amusing one, I think, probably, was a time I sat with a young woman in Poland long before I actually could speak Polish, and I indicated from the menu I wanted a certain type of food. And the food arrived, and I began to eat rather liberally. Everyone seemed to be quite excited.
It was going quite well. And then the young woman asked me, do you like liver? And I said, liver? I hate liver. Why do you ask?
And she said, well, that’s exactly what you are eating. You are eating liver. And with great embarrassment, I continued to eat. Another small story. I swore that I would never wear pink because for my generation, pink was associated with a color of perhaps weakness, unmanliness.
Women wore pink, but men always wore blue. Now I am slightly color blind, and I’m wearing this beautiful shirt one day, and a friend of mine, female friend of mine, asked me, wow. I never knew that you liked wearing pink. And there I was, once again going against my bias. So on my most recent trip, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 2 gentlemen from the Punjab.
I spoke to a young teacher. I spoke to a feminist who was greatly against the so called patriarchy. I’ve spoken to a man who is dressed up like a woman, I guess in drag. Quite an interesting conversation, to be honest. I asked him, do you like this?
He say, oh, I just love being dressed up in drag. I said, well, what do you do when you’re not doing this? Oh, he said. I’m a bartender because I love people. Once again, I had to put my biases away.
And what you realize, of course, is that most of your biases are unfounded. And if they exist and continue to exist, at the very least, whether you disagree with a person’s, perhaps, religion or sexuality or lifestyle, you ultimately have to follow, perhaps, what Confucius said somewhat as well, and that is, if you respect me by definition, I must respect you. The golden rule. So all these biases that I find myself inculcated with from a very early age, many times, are purely formed. And the ultimate result of my bias, if you will, is Auschwitz.
It’s a place that the state decides to remove a certain type of people for, perhaps, their religion, their sexuality, their ideology, and it’s just wrong in a liberal democracy because, ultimately, we must somehow learn to love one another because your essence is equally as important as my essence. I must learn to put my biases away. Though I can continue to disagree about you and the way you live, that is up to you, ultimately. It is not up to me. So the next time you go to eat some type of food that you think you won’t really enjoy and perhaps begin to, you can say to yourself, wow.
My bias is changing. I’m becoming a different person, and you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is necessary if we are going to embrace humanity and learn to live and love one another in the truest sense, and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.