An Inconvenient Truth: Superficiality

The week during break, my family went to visit some friends in South Carolina. The experience of meeting people who live so differently from me and seeing the diversity of America was fun, but I was struck by how people judge each other in an instant for so many trivial reasons. I'm not the first or last person to judge someone based on looks, but I think the fact that we make so many snap decisions about people needs to be taken under consideration. It's becoming less important who you are and how you connect with someone. More important now is what you seem like based on the superficial, be it your attractiveness, your apparent wealth, what town you live in, or the color of your skin.

When we were passing through some run-down areas on our trip, I talked with people of all types at gas stations, restaurants, anywhere we stopped to take a break from our long drive. There was a different kind of interaction with everyone, and I formulated the manner I talked with people from the start. I found myself subconsciously choosing to avoid this person or identifying that person as 'nice'. My decisions had nothing to do with past experiences, obviously. It was all based off of appearance, from which I extrapolated characteristics that I had no right to create.

This made me realize how much we set ourselves up to prejudge other human beings. What right do we have to play the role of jury in deciding what kind of a person someone is, when we know nothing about their life?

We encourage this with sites like Facebook, where people associate you with a bunch of photos and carefully crafted statements and posts. True, people can find out your Favorite Music (really the music you think is cool to post up as your favorite) and see what your friends are saying, but how much of that is you? How much more of you cannot be represented by a profile? Only face to face can we make huge decisions about character, but the internet is tempting us to make these determinations through a computer screen.

I need to make more efforts to get to know someone as a person with wants and needs and reasoning before I file them away under a title and a final verdict. Everyone warns about 'not judging a book by its cover', but how hard is it not to? Isn't it comforting to immediately know who's ok and not ok, and then not bother with it again? Yes, it's easy, but it's not right.