My World: What I Unlearned at College
Rachel Richardson
Issue date: 6/3/03 Section: Opinion
As I grew older and moved away from my surroundings, I began to see the world without the oppressive blinders of hatred on. I started college, first at NKU for three years and now at RWC for the past year. College opened up an entirely new world for me, one I had never encountered before. The more diverse friends I made and the wider scope of people I met, the more I learned of others' beliefs, leading into a class lesson on tolerance and acceptance. I soon stopped equating people as being "black," or "gay," or "different" and began to think of them as Paul, or Ryan, or Amanda. People who had always been spoken about so abstractly in my family became real to me as I began to see the actual person behind the stereotype, finding that they didn't add up to the visions of my parents.
We are all more similar than some of us care to admit. We all eat and sleep, and most of us are not independently wealthy and must work to survive. We all crave companionship, we worry and obsess over problems, we have strengths, and we have weaknesses. We hold many of the same fears of disease, war, and death. We love and we laugh; we cry and we suffer. In short, we are all human.
As a society, we've come a long way in our collective evolution of cultural diversity, but we're not at the finish line yet. It isn't until we all realize that each other, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, body size, location or class, is all we have on this rock in space we call home that we will be able to transcend the hatred that still lingers amongst us so prevalently. It is by focusing on our similarities, rather than our differences and finding that common ground we all share that this wave of change can be realized. We all have to be the first domino to fall, thereby sparking a wave of global change.
Hatred is self-destructive, I have found. It is a parasite that eats away at you, festering in mind and heart, until it eventually devours the host. It is only by letting go of this malice towards others that we can hope for balance and well-being in our own lives.
There are no perfect grades in this class on tolerance, no acing the test or graduating with a 4.0. I find that lessons instilled since childhood still surface to the top, but like bubbles in water, they can be popped with an educated consciousness that they are wrong. Acceptance of others doesn't always shine through for me, but I try to recognize it and transform it. In the end, that's all that we really can do.
Helen Keller once said, "The highest result of education is tolerance." I agree. I went to college to learn but, paradoxically, it is what I unlearned that I consider to be the crowning accomplishment of my education.
We are all more similar than some of us care to admit. We all eat and sleep, and most of us are not independently wealthy and must work to survive. We all crave companionship, we worry and obsess over problems, we have strengths, and we have weaknesses. We hold many of the same fears of disease, war, and death. We love and we laugh; we cry and we suffer. In short, we are all human.
As a society, we've come a long way in our collective evolution of cultural diversity, but we're not at the finish line yet. It isn't until we all realize that each other, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, body size, location or class, is all we have on this rock in space we call home that we will be able to transcend the hatred that still lingers amongst us so prevalently. It is by focusing on our similarities, rather than our differences and finding that common ground we all share that this wave of change can be realized. We all have to be the first domino to fall, thereby sparking a wave of global change.
Hatred is self-destructive, I have found. It is a parasite that eats away at you, festering in mind and heart, until it eventually devours the host. It is only by letting go of this malice towards others that we can hope for balance and well-being in our own lives.
There are no perfect grades in this class on tolerance, no acing the test or graduating with a 4.0. I find that lessons instilled since childhood still surface to the top, but like bubbles in water, they can be popped with an educated consciousness that they are wrong. Acceptance of others doesn't always shine through for me, but I try to recognize it and transform it. In the end, that's all that we really can do.
Helen Keller once said, "The highest result of education is tolerance." I agree. I went to college to learn but, paradoxically, it is what I unlearned that I consider to be the crowning accomplishment of my education.