Saturday, November 20, 2010

When it Pours...It's Because It Was Raining...


"When it rains, it pours..." Oh Really? That's what is happening? I guess it makes sense now, that it would have to be raining in order for it to pour. Oh wait, I think Cpt. Obvious is going to come next and tell me, "...when it snows, it's cold!" I guess maybe I'm a bit of a rarity in the sense of not appreciating the normalcy of such foolhardily statements that insult the intelligence of us all. I think often times we take things as truth without salivating to the untruth therein; we tend to absorb and ingest with minimal filtering.

I was just realizing today that labor and focus are so often overlooked in the formation of us as people in today's society. We tend to overvalue the intellectual and undervalue the practical. We substitute the power of thought over the prowess of labor. We put onto a pedestal and glorify certain positions within society and simultaneously humiliate and discourage from others. We look at the landscapers and assume they've dropped out of colleges. We look at the lawyers and assume they've worked hard enough, for long enough to lie for a living and make a lot of money (joke). Oh, and that they 'didn't' drop out of college like those measly landscapers.

This quote sums up the situation at hand: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves..." (Carl Jung, Founder of Analytical Psychology). It makes me wonder at times whether or not people from particularly well-to-do circles are intimated by what manual labor stands for; what it entails, the nature of the individual involved. Also, in reverse, It has always concerned me the approach that folks from lower income backgrounds take towards white-collar people. They seem to have a highly-misconstrued view of wealthy-people and how they've achieved such. Wealthy people think poor people are where there at because they are lazy and don't work hard. Poor people think wealthy people were given everything and don't understand hard work.

MLK said it best about our own preconceived notions and presuppositions about one another:
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity..." Our ignorance about others only feeds into our own superciliousness and increases the gap between us; distorting any idea of unity beyond recognition. I've been called a lot of things in life; close-minded is one of those things. I would have to agree that I could be, in many aspects categorized as such. However, it's not a position that I find myself relishing in but more so one that I fight consistently and militantly to remove myself from.

None of us are holistically absent of ignorance, It would be ignorant to think such. I used to have a friend in college who tried to convince me one day that he was humble, I encouraged him, and informed him that by telling me such he had just refuted his own argument; he still didn't get it. The reality is that we all come to the table to eat already full from our own biases; we don't come on empty, just accepting whatever is presented, nor should we. We must overlook the ignorance and embrace the reality that we are all on this earth together fighting towards greater good, hopefully. If we cannot bypass our bias and proceed past prejudice we just fail to complete the work that's been started in us and we fail-fully to gain what was intended in our creation; to glorify and magnify our creator who's image we were made in.

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