While I'm on the subject......

The subject of prejudism that is. One of the reasons that I tell my story about changing my mind and my idea's of gay men is to show people that you can change someones mind. Not with anger and hate of your own but by what I call persistance instances of sanity. Why would you bother? Well because a good portion of people who are prejudice are either so by ignorance or apathy, both of these are curable (unlike being gay, african american, ect.). Of course the most out spoken prejudice people are filled with hate, and I don't know that you can ever change someones mind when they need to hate, I think that is a spritual thing. Ignorace and Apathy tho' is what lets people who hate get what they want. Take for instance segragated schools, listen to the arguements for segargation, they can sound so so sensible to someone who is not on their guard. Statements like 1) But black people are diffrent. (yep they are diffrent, good thing to as us white people do some pretty messed up stuff) 2) They go to seprate schools but learning is learning so it shouldn't matter (ummm yea but see it did because "black" schools didn't have books or the tools to teach kids in the same way that the "white" schools did) 3) (here is the one I love) But I don't want my kids around black people and I have the right to say what my kid is exposed to (which really translates into I don't want my daughter to see that black men are attractive. The funny part was they were right about this one, many white people find people of other races attractive I wonder if that is actually an instictive nature thing to find someone that looks as diffrent as possible from you to love, and seriously nature vs. the bible and nature is gonna win every single time). Of course most people I know would never consider going back to Segrating schools but hopefully by outline what some of the arguements were you can see how if someone didn't have kids and was apathtic to what was happening you can see how they might have accepted some of these arguements if there wasn't other people around to say "hey no, listen these reasons are BS and this is why". If your gonna fight prejudism you have to understand the other peoples arguements, why? because they are shouting their reasoning from the roof top and although their reasoning is full of holes on the surface it will sound reasonable to the uneducated and poorly informed. We must be able to combat bad reasoning with good, we must have our sources and they must be impeachable sources, we must be able to reason with logic and humor about history and our view of the future. We must assume that it will take more then one talk, that we should not assume that just because we didn't change someones mind this day that they won't come back and ask questions later so we should never end the conversation in a heated angery way. And if you don't know something then just say it, just say I don't know but we can look it up.

These things work, they worked on me and they now work by me. I don't when every fight, sometimes I really piss people off, but I hope that some people who are apathic or ignorant are listening in on the side, maybe not ready to speak up yet and thinking to themselve, "hey yea that girl has some points and she isn't a raving luntic" (not being a raving luntic is one of my goals in life)