Prejudice

Did you ever have the experience of someone thinking something bad about you without any hard evidence? That's one of the many ugly heads of prejudice, and it's hard to fight, because people who make lame assumptions have no idea they're doing it. How can they possibly stop when they don't even know they're doing it? If someone be capable of inventing the truth, good luck trying to get through to him.

A friend of mine revealed a prejudice lately. To wit, he thinks I must necessarily suck at office work because I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. Why he chose office work and not actuarial statistics, teaching, or janitorial work I'll never know. In fact, I've held my own in the office for many years despite the difficulties posed by my disorder. (This probably wasn't the best thing I could have done for my health, but for what it's worth I did it.) I proved myself to no avail, however, because prejudice lives on.

It got me thinking in two different directions. On the one hand, it probably isn't healthy for me to spend too much time with people who show this particular prejudice. And that really sucks because I've already promised to accompany this person to Church for Easter and model for his art project. A few days ago he gave me the key to his house. What can I possibly say when I hand it back to him? I'm hopelessly enmeshed for the time being. I need to find a way to painlessly extract myself and grow away from the man, just for my own emotional well-being.

On the other hand, I was thinking about the nature of impediments versus limitations. Anyone familiar with the dynamics of iterative equations knows that they're not the same thing. You can take a detour or march through mud and still reach your destination. If you run full bore or manage some other parameter(s) you could even make good time! I was thinking about people who may have sacrificed their best destinies to dispel prejudice -- the speech-impaired people who became news anchors, for example. As I walked down the street sobbing, I imagined what I hoped such a person would say to someone who asked, "How could you do this to us? I read your ideas and you could have done our community a lot of good if you had followed them and brought them to fruition. Instead you chose the most challenging route available to you, becoming a one-legged running champion." I hope the person would say that he had sacrificed his ideas and aptitudes for the sake of every disabled person in the world (including the nice lady writing this story,) so that prejudice would be overcome.