Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

...Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

-Douglas Adams

As people, I don’t think we can begin to fathom the consequences of our own actions, let alone the actions of humankind on a global scale. Yet, like a mosaic up close, one must step back to see the picture. What is seemingly chaotic can suddenly come into focus as a choreographed dance from a distance.

Therefore, we must do this when we think about the world we live in. To judge things from our own limited vantage point is like trying to touch the mosaic with your nose and still see what the artist intended. Our own assumed experience, knowledge, and beliefs lend us to discrimination against those things that are foreign to us, in their ideals, race, culture, or beliefs.

It is difficult to comprehend what discrimination has done. The problems that could be contributed to it are vast and countless, yet is still happens all the time. Discrimination, in the form of racism, sexism, and general xenophobia, has allowed countless generations of human beings to dehumanize each other, to make their fellow man less than human,  merely something meant to be educated by force, liberated, battled, cleansed, killed and victimized. This discrimination causes its victims,  not just feel worthless, but  to keep a piece of that resentment with them, and pass it on to create an ongoing cycle of discrimination.

Countless deaths can be traced back to some form of discrimination on a small and large scale. Everything from petty disagreements to massive wars can be attributed to discrimination’s name. In war discrimination  can even become a tool for soldiers who must, to keep their sanity, dehumanize the victims of war. You don’t hear many soldiers saying, “I just killed a man in battle that I held on equal grounds with myself.” You hear, “I killed three of those Japs today! or “Those Yankees didn’t stand a chance!” or “Mark me down for three of those towel heads.”

I think it says something about an action that requires the degradation of humans in order to complete said action.

To me, though, discrimination can be seen on smaller levels. Do we not constantly see the young discriminate against the old, and the old discriminate against the young? The younger seem to grow up thinking that older people know nothing at all, and older people think younger people are hopelessly lost. Do we not see in situations where there are strong differences in opinions that people can forget that they are only speaking opinion, that they dehumanize their opponent in order to keep their beliefs? Atheists and Christians have a long history of this. They end up calling themselves by those labels to avoid coming to terms with the fact that they are both just expressing their opinions, which allows them to keep feeling they have the superior position.

Yet we give differences of opinion their power to divide, not only within religion, but also in everything. We give them substance and make them as solid as walls between others and ourselves. It starts on a large scale. I live on this continent, in this country, in this state, in this county, in this city, in this house. We've set ourselves up for division. We do not just have rivalry between countries, but also between states, counties, cities, and in our own neighborhood. Then we build up our belief boundaries. I am part of this faith, or I am strictly part of none. I follow these political lines, or I don't believe in any of it. I drive this type of car, listen to this music, I am this race, this age, this ethnicity, this, that, and so on, so forth until each person can easily be pitted against the next.

These are not insurmountable differences, of course. There is probably some cosmic reason that we are divided, but should there not be common needs, common goals, and things that we can all agree on in general? For example, there are certain things that every one absolutely needs. If everyone must have these things to survive securely then everyone should be entitled to them. MMany of the world’s struggles come from the fear that we will not have what we need to survive. Some people would rather deny this to people because someone would stop doing his share knowing that he doesn't have to do anything to survive, but if people only worked for what was necessary, greed would be outdated.

It isn’t that it did not exist in politics before, but the masses seem to be politicized, made to be more active in politics because that is what is on TV. That is what is on the Internet. It is becoming more common to hear people referred to not as brother, or fellow human, but as liberals and conservatives. There is most certainly a difference of opinion, but this does not change the fact that we are all still human (except for those commies!). Regardless of what we believe, what we look like, and who we are, we are all still human, and we all still matter. I won’t claim that some day we will learn that we all have influence on the world around us; because that implies that everyone will want to take responsibility for his or her own actions.

I will suggest, however, that it would be a good thing if we could keep in mind that most opinions are in the realm of possibility, that all beliefs are valid if someone believes them. It would be a good thing if we learned that two opposing ideas can exist and everyone can still be happy. All ideas are valid in that they are all ideas, whether right or wrong.