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Stirring up trouble at the RI
12/14/04
Stirring up trouble at the RI
Had a few minutes to kill, so I typed up this little blurb in response to this thread. I know I sound obnoxious. It's a sticking point for me, though. It's not Mike at all... heaven knows he thinks about more things and more deeply in an hour than I will in my lifetime.. It's just that some things in this life seem like they're made to be complicated beyond all reason when they are really so simple. Isn't this stuff a fundamental of the faith? I don't know. It just seems like it should be, and when I see everyone debating and flying back and forth, somehow I just want to stop it all and try and impose some sort of order to the jargon. I'm not trying to make people sound stupid - I'm trying to break these supposedly complicated things down into Stupid People Terms, expressly for stupid people like me. I can't deal with covering every one of my cultural bases. I wish I could visit every place, from Detroit to Djibouti, getting to see every type of person, but I can't, and so I have to be resolved to just be reasonable. People are people... Everyone but me seems to find this difficult. Sometimes being simple and cynical is a bit of a curse.
My question:
Is it really, truly neccessary, or possible, for that matter, to have personal interactions with every type of ethnic, racial, and social class in order to be a sensitive and loving individual? Would my (as well as yours, for that matter) lack of exposure to Sri Lankans and/or the culture of Greenland negatively affect me in the instance that I should, in fact, meet up with one? If we're trying to go about "breaking the bubble" of whateverbubbleitisyou'rethinkingof, being "exposed" to every culture and ethnicity and type of person is truly neither plausible nor is it necessary, in my opinion. People are people. Everyone tries to dress it up and try to make everyone sensitive, but the fact is that prejudices are often not even broken when the object of prejudice lives right next door. If the object is to break out of the bubble your kids may be in, there are better ways of making people prepared to meet every sort of person than to have them meet every single person. The better ways include - don't use racial language around your children; make sure your kids know that Jesus died for sinners, and not for churchgoers only and that if anyone was perfect, Jesus needn't have come; and don't pussyfoot around trying to promote cultural tolerance or interest out of some sense of duty. Just get in the business of loving all sorts of people, whoever they are, because they're people and the Bible says to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is the second greatest commandment. People are people, people. I don't really understand the difficulty here.
No offense, but this isn't rocket science. It's overcomplication. To blame "lack of exposure" for prejudice and/or inability to speak to or think of other human beings as anything but other human beings is, in my opinion, a thinly-veiled way of trying to justify people's inability to follow a simple commandment.
4 comments
I forgot to put my final question in there - am I really, really obnoxious? no you're not obnoxious. i enjoyed the post.
I kind of wonder at my Nursing Comm class this past quarter. I spent probably 5-10 hours, or maybe more (who knows it all blurs together) on my cultural paper, presentation and project. The whole class actually was cross-cultural education. We covered like, EVERYONE and everything, it seemed like, and although it was nice to learn about the different cultures out there, I didn't really pick up on much. I know how to point like the filipinos do, i know some muslim traditions... but is learning in a classroom really gonna help?
I think it would've been better to put some communication skills in our hands that work with many different kinds of people groups and let us learn on our own. I think that culuture and interacting properly with other cultures is just something you have to learn as you go on in life. And you can't just force culture onto people. I mean, hey, I've lived on a native american reservation for a long time and I still haven't picked up on hardly any of their culture, nor understood it. I think you just have to want it, want to understand, want to learn.
And I've found that if you are a homeschooler who is objective and just wants to learn, you'll be pretty good at exploring another culture, even if it's the chinese neighbors down the street.
I don't know if this had much to do with your post, but it got me thinking. hehe. NO you are not being obnoxious. I'm much more inclined to listen to you just because of the way you put things, honestly. Thoughtful, yet simple, and trying to get a circumspective view, rather than falling into the temptation of stereotypes. I may post more on the actual thread... She's going to be roped!, She's going to be caged!, That shelterd homeschooler's going to be caged!!!... 
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