Tag Archives: the south

Alienate

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alienate:(v) cause someone to feel isolated or estranged: e.g. an urban environment that would alienate its inhabitants

Some words are symbiotic twins. (Are the words “symbiotic” and “twins” redundant? I’ll have to look that up.) Anyway, they work together to create a good or to create the potential for evil.

You will never need to alienate another human being as long as you’re willing to confront the mediocre in your life.

For instance, if you run across people who are better than you at some task, rather than trying to attack their acumen, you evolve and learn from them. If you accept the mediocre in your life, it becomes necessary to foster a disgruntled attitude and discover something unseemly about your competition.

All prejudice is grounded in a sense of mediocrity. I will tell you, if the white people in the South prior to the Civil War had raised offspring who could work the fields, toiling with the same diligence as the Africans, they wouldn’t have felt the need to alienate the hostages as inferior, but instead, would have joined them, shoulder to shoulder, pursuing their cotton-picking minds.

I know when I start becoming critical of others, it is a warning sign that I’ve accepted mediocre behavior, and because some strangers have dared to be superior to me, I begin to find fault and separate them from my field of play and stable of friends.

We do it in politics. We certainly do it in religion. We do it in corporations, by trying to spread rumors about another company’s hiring practices instead of allowing for the product itself to find place in the market.

Mediocre and alienate are twins.

If you are alienating somebody from your life right now, it’s because you’ve accepted some sort of mediocre attitude as normal. And if you’re mediocre, you will eventually need to alienate people who dare to excel.

It’s why in the United States it is more popular to talk about our uniqueness than it is to review our plans and critique our progress. When the stats and facts about our world placement in education, health care and even personal relationships is measured against other countries, we are not always found at the top. So this demands that we alienate. Some of our favorite terms:

  • third world
  • backward
  • non-Democratic
  • and ignorant

Great people don’t have to criticize anyone. They just evolve towards the new understanding instead of staying entrenched in tradition.

When you get rid of mediocre, you no longer feel the need to alienate other people. When you’re alienating people, it’s always a sign of some mediocre part of you trying to justify … blah.

 

Across

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practixdirtied by bigotry.

dictionary with letter A

Across: (adj.) 1.the motion of moving back and forth; e.g. I moved across the table  2. an expression of location; e.g. the store is across town.

I was trying to count it in my mind.

I think it’s about twenty-five. Yes, I have gone across this nation of the United States about twenty-five times in my life. Somebody asked me if I did all of this “jaunting” because I enjoy traveling.

Absolutely not.

I hate long drives. My butt gets tired sittin’ in my van–and how to stay regular on an irregular schedule has yet to be discovered by any mortal.

I was just never satisfied to believe what I hear.

Case in point: growing up in Ohio, I was taught that people in the south hated blacks. I was informed that folks who lived in California were all hippies. And New York City moved along so fast that if you stopped to catch your breath, you would probably get hit by a bus.

It’s just easy to sit at home and listen to all the tales about humanity and start thinking they’re part of your own experience instead of just rumors floating your way. That’s why we get the notion that “Asian people are good at math” and “Europeans make the best wine.”

Prejudice is not the by-product of an experience. It is the absence of one.

I wasn’t satisfied to listen to the tales of travelers who brought back THEIR rendition of the human race. I guess this is why I like the statement in the Bible where it says that “Jesus passed by.”

After all, you can’t sit your butt down in a carpenter’s shop in Nazareth and spout what you think about the world without going across the land to meet real people in their real situations. If Jesus hadn’t been itinerant, he would have been just another Jewish prophet instead of a friend to the world.

So when I went across this land to the south, I found out that people there didn’t hate blacks any more than folks in Cleveland.

  • Citizens of New York actually DO slow down–because honestly, there’s a lot of traffic jams.
  • And Bakersfield, California, has fewer hippies in it than any place in the world.

But you have to go there to find out. You won’t learn it on CNN or Fox News.

So perhaps my most joyous achievement is that I’ve gone across America, met her people and can truthfully tell you that I love them.

I can recommend getting your information from the horse’s mouth, instead of having it handed down to you from paws that just might be dirtied … by bigotry.