I have to take a break to reflect on how ignorant some of my students are, both blissfully and voluntarily. The last two articles I had them read in class dealt with the social construct and e/affect of phrases like "That is so gay!" and with the idea of tolerance and acceptance. While I am not surprised by some of their responses in their writing, I am floored by how many of them still practice such a subconciously subversive form of prejudice. On the one hand they write about how it is ok to accept everyone for their differences and how things are changing and there is nothing wrong with people who are different and in the very next line they will use phrases like: those people, the gays, gays, them, those kinds of people. Understandably (why does that word look odd to me?), this is a matter of rhetoric and syntax, but the point is that some of these kids have been socialized and enculturated to believe one set of things but encouraged to hide those anti-norms in order to escape persecution. I would rather someone be prejudiced to my face than to try and hide it so that they don;t get attacked. Some of these people have the intelligence of Mekack Chimpanzees (I KNOW that is not the right spelling of the genus) and while it may seem inappropriate for a teacher to say that about their students, we all know that those kinds of people exist. I say it not to make fun, but to simply educate. There ARE people who truly are stupid enough to not have a single original thought that doesn;t originate above the waist or fed from a tube of hallucinogenic light. I find as I get older that I have less and less patience with people who just don't get it, and while I may be hypocritical for saying that, I at least get THEM. I get why they think the way they do and they behave the way they do. I have had more than enough experience dealing with prejudice in ALL its forms, and ironically, it always stems from things that don't even remotely apply to me, i.e. Arab profiling. I can't even be witty about this because ignorance, especially the blind kind, is the one thing that gets me riled up. Not saying everyone needs to be as freewheeling as I do in their acceptance of the "other," but don't spout off uninformed opinions that you can't back up with anything other than: Just because.
Slackjawed monolinguistic neolithic oafs.
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on Tuesday, November 11, 2003 at 6:18 PM.
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