I'm Prejudiced And I Know It

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm prejudiced.

It's a radical thing for anyone to fess up to this, but there's liberation in coming clean.

It may also be the most proactive step any of us can take to better understand the sin of who we judge, feel contempt toward, or at the extreme, hope to get rid of.

Prejudice can be a quiet volcano, but the hate that erupts from it is flowing through every town and community in America. That doesn't make us so great. It makes us insane.

This should give us a good reason to look deeply at the hate we personally spew, instead of feeling entitled to it by calling it free speech. 

I've discovered my particular prejudice comes from early childhood, beginning at the dinner table where my first memories were formed—and where my parents demanded impeccable manners and respectful behavior. No fooling around was tolerated.

Eating too fast, talking with a mouthful, elbows on the table, showing up in curlers, or sneezing into a napkin instead of leaving the table would prompt my father to ask if we were raised in a barn. At first, I was confused because Jesus was born in a barn. But then it was explained that poor folks were raised in barns and had dirty habits.

My parents scrutinized everyone's habits and judged them accordingly. They happily welcomed guests of every skin color and rank to their dinner table so long as they exhibited proper table manners, including proper dress. Tank tops were deemed vulgar since they revealed too much cleavage—or chest hair, and picking teeth even with a toothpick was considered boorish, so those guests were not to be seen again.

Making this childhood connection has clarified why I've always felt ill at ease around people who wear tank tops and walk around with toothpicks hanging from their mouths. They were fair game for the adjectives I learned early on describing such people: coarse, uncouth, classless, ill-bred, unrefined, and uncivilized.

So when I see a cheering MAGA crowd, it so happens I also see a preponderance of tank tops and toothpicks dangling under their MAGA hats, and the judgment starts. But I'm working on that now.

My parents loved life and never taught me or my siblings to hate. In fact, I never saw a hint of hate from either as we traveled and adapted to new cultures as a foreign service family. But they did fill me with judgmental ideas and perceptions about status and class. And it's these judgments about others that can unconsciously evolve into hate.

Last night I saw one such human volcano erupt. This podcaster totally lost his cookies over Pam Bondi closing the Epstein investigation. He acted like he'd love to see her land in shackles and get her head shaved for finding no there-there in that dream file that landed on her desk.

In his misogynistic, hateful mind, Bondi's an inept woman who denied him the glee of watching Bill Clinton go to prison. But, had she revealed the full truth of what was in the file, it might have included video of the Donald doing a lot more than dancing with Epstein. The podcaster needs to get a grip. We all need to.

I'm trying. We should all try. It may be the only way to make America sane again.