Think back to a time when you felt threatened. Your purse was stolen as you were window shopping downtown. It was a man wearing a gray hoodie and white tennis shoes. You never did get a good look at his face as it all happened so suddenly, but the gray hoodie and white shoes are forever engrained in your mind as a threat.
You're shopping again. Six months later. You laugh with your friends until you meet the glass doors to the parking lot and part ways. Just as you are about to unlock your car a man in a gray hoodie and white shoes walks by and you scream. A loud, somebody-help-I'm-being-murdered scream.
He was 26. Went to the local college and lived with his parents. Dating a girl named April for about three months now, which he was celebrating tonight and getting her a new necklace at the mall. Turns out, man in the gray hoodie was harmless this time.
You just stereotyped based on past experience, based on something somebody else did. Your fear was justified given the past scenario, but... The man in the gray hoodie and white shoes was NOT the man in the gray hoodie and white shoes that stole your purse. In fact, wearing a gray hoodie and white shoes is common. It's popular. So to think that every man wearing that is going to steal your purse is not only wrong, it's very close-minded.
Now think larger scale. Not a purse being stolen but a culture being threatened.
We all have fear. Fear of people unlike us. Fear of cultures as a whole due to a percentage that is trying to harm our way of life.
Yes, the fact is many Muslims are plotting against us, to put it simply. Does that make every Muslim guilty? Does that mean everybody named Mohammed is condemned? It's a popular name, a respectable name. It's a gray hoodie and white shoes.
I urge you to know the person before the accusations. The peaceful are not irrelevant; the good is not irrelevant.
Hope does exist. The world is filled with good things and good people. We have to start believing that... We have to start SEEING that, focusing on that.
The bad excites us, it's a problem to be solved, it's ever present and strikes fear.. It's not everything though.
Every man named Mohammed is not a terrorist and every person in a gray hoodie and white shoes is not a thief.
Choose to see the good, it's beautiful when you look at it.
There's so much bad in the world. Shootings and terrorists and purse-stealers, but we each have the power to change that. To turn fear into courage and have steadfast hope for humanity.
I'm choosing hope. Don't let me down, humies.
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