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Last night my oldest daughter and a couple of her friends were discussing 9/11 and it turned into an argument, about politics, race and in part religion. Though all three of these kids claim the same beliefs as far as religion goes. They found out that one of them had a very different view on how to handle a person that didn’t either believe like you do or that as he put it “missed the boat 2000 years ago”. It started out on a discussion about if our country chose the right course after 9/11, to what they believed the war is really about today, and went down hill from there...
It always surprises me how young, kids learn to say the right thing but when they are in the middle of an argument their true feelings come out. For my oldest it is hard to find out that someone she thought she knew well isn't someone she knew at all. Some truly ugly beliefs came out. Ones that I had hoped would have been lost to this younger generation. It was sad to hear the same old prejudices come out of a young man's mouth last night, which I had heard over and over as a kid. Finding out that a person can hate a group of people that he really didn’t know, but thinks he knows, was hard for my oldest to accept. Especially when he made the comment that the sound of her name was not fitting to her looks or race, and that she needed to rethink changing her name.
I was proud of my oldest and her other friend for standing up for themselves and for what they believed in, when it was obvious that to save a friendship it would have been easier for them to either back down or to just change the subject. But they felt it was worth the risk, that just possibly they should try and help their friend to understand that you can’t judge a person by their race, the sound of their name, or by what they believe in. Especially when it comes to helping them be protected from others. That you can’t just stand by and watch someone hurt someone else and does nothing, just because you don’t like who is being hurt.
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