Goodbye Prejudice

八（5）颜晓沐

I once heard a story: A boy and his father were in a horrible car accident. Unfortunately, the father died on impact, and the son who was seriously injured was quickly sent to hospital. The surgeon there looked at the son and said: “I’m afraid I can’t operate.” “But why?” “Because the boy is my son.” You may ask: How can that be? Isn’t the son’s father dead? Actually, the surgeon is the boy’s mother. Surprising, isn’t it? But why can’t surgeons be women? That’s an example of gender prejudice. And prejudice is just what I want to change.

What’s prejudice? That’s unfair negative attitudes towards someone or something. As we experience typical cases in our lives, we’re likely to form a thinking frame in our brains. So when we see something with a certain feature, we may judge it hastily, although we don’t know it well yet. Almost all the people wear a pair of glasses, the glasses of labels, big or small, which often leads to prejudice.

While I expect to change prejudice, or I say destroy it, there’re several reasons. First, big prejudice leads to pride, or even violence. Let’s take racial discrimination as an example. We become impolite or even hostile to another race, just because people there have different looks and different bloods from us. Isn’t it terrible and absurd? Just because of colors, we pick up the gun of prejudice. And then, there comes bias, wars, losses of lives…But what if the gun can disappear? Imagine: White, yellow or black skin, black, brown or blonde hair, colorful eyes shining like diamonds… What a beautiful scene. If prejudice can go away, there’ll be less unreasonable tragedies. That’s the same with the gender prejudice mentioned at the beginning. As people no longer set themselves on top of the pyramid, we build a better relationship with those different from us. We can admit and admire other’s shining points, and the quicker development of the world is the result.

Second, besides big prejudice, small ones in our daily life also need to be changed. A talk show actor Xu Zhisheng recently said in a reality show: When audiences see an ugly-looking talk show actor, they’ll probably think he’s humorous without himself speaking a word. That’s a funny phenomenon, but it also reflects prejudice. Or there’s a more common example: Let us suppose there’re two students who sit together. Student A usually gets a good score, while student B is not good at studying. When they both solved an extremely difficult problem, most people prefer to believe that student B copied student A’s answers. But what if student B worked it out all by himself? A precious opportunity for him to gain confidence, has been wasted by prejudice. There’re thousands of similar examples happening around us every day. Have you ever judged a book just by looking at its cover? Or looked down upon the poor? Just imagine how much the society will improve without them. No prejudice towards appearance, no anxiety of appearance. No prejudice towards the past, no inferiority for the future.

Last but not least, in the broad sense, prejudice can be regarded as one of the most unforgivable disadvantages of humanity. We can say that stupidness is prejudice towards greater things, jealousy is prejudice towards better people, theft is prejudice towards ownership, and murder is prejudice towards life. One has prejudice towards something, that means he or she ignores or sees wrongly of the thing’s value. If everyone knew the real equality between each other, why would there still be prejudice? We change prejudice, and so we prevent almost all the sins in the world. That’s a little bit abstract, but it worth our reflection.

All in all, prejudice, big or small, narrow or broad, funny or cruel, shall be changed. Although eliminating it thoroughly is still a dream, I suggest, if everyone tries to treat others equally, we’ll finally say goodbye to prejudice. Let’s start by this: When it comes to surgeons next time, we must know they can be women, too. Thank you.