I can understand why Malcolm was so militant at first, why he didn't give a fuck about what other people thought or how they felt about what he had to say. Martin was so peaceful in public, so gracious and forgiving and humble but it must have been difficult. When people look at you and make judgments it's infuriating to the point where you just want to grab hold of them and give them a good shake. People's biases and their inability to see beyond their own immediate world of circumstances leads to a countless number of misconceptions. To think that a person thinks they know who you are by what you look like or how you dress is just so maddening that it's sometimes even hard to understand how you feel much less to explain it to someone else. It's something that a person could never really understand unless they experience it. I can only assume that it is a similar feeling that women get when men make judgments about their character by they way they choose to dress. There is certainly something to be said about the fact that clothes can be taken off and changed whereas skin color and often times even social class stays with you for the duration of your time on earth. But even the novel idea of judging a person by what they wear is such a toxic one because the vast majority of our judgments are completely unwarranted and uninformed.
Human beings are so malleable and impressionable that it does not take a complex lie to fool us, even a simple one can take hold in our minds and blossom into an entire world view based on an untruth. The sources of this misinformation are so abundant that we can scarcely escape being tainted from birth. Having the misconceptions and biases of our parents and all that came before them just unloaded onto us as an inheritance. We are rarely afforded the opportunity to truly think for ourselves and to truly forge our own paths. To make our own decisions about what is right and what is wrong what is valuable and what is not. Instead we are beholden to traditions, beliefs and the collective sum of all the misconceptions that our species have manage to accumulate since we first discovered our consciousness.
This is our greatest fault and as such is the case we are bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over in hopes of achieving a different results. We allow the most egregious atrocities in the name of beliefs that have no merit as tools for teaching morality. Doctrines that often do more harm than good, that sow seeds of hatred and division. So far none of us have had enough time in existence to figure it all out yet instead of using the little time we have for progress we have chosen to be lazy and let others think for us. JFK famously said that we chose to do things like go to the moon not because they are easy but because they are hard. "...because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills...". This is how we should live, taking the hard route; not doing things because that's what we have always done or that's what we were taught to do. We should live to beat our own paths, make our own decisions and question everything until the answers are found.
Human beings are so malleable and impressionable that it does not take a complex lie to fool us, even a simple one can take hold in our minds and blossom into an entire world view based on an untruth. The sources of this misinformation are so abundant that we can scarcely escape being tainted from birth. Having the misconceptions and biases of our parents and all that came before them just unloaded onto us as an inheritance. We are rarely afforded the opportunity to truly think for ourselves and to truly forge our own paths. To make our own decisions about what is right and what is wrong what is valuable and what is not. Instead we are beholden to traditions, beliefs and the collective sum of all the misconceptions that our species have manage to accumulate since we first discovered our consciousness.
This is our greatest fault and as such is the case we are bound to repeat the same mistakes over and over in hopes of achieving a different results. We allow the most egregious atrocities in the name of beliefs that have no merit as tools for teaching morality. Doctrines that often do more harm than good, that sow seeds of hatred and division. So far none of us have had enough time in existence to figure it all out yet instead of using the little time we have for progress we have chosen to be lazy and let others think for us. JFK famously said that we chose to do things like go to the moon not because they are easy but because they are hard. "...because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills...". This is how we should live, taking the hard route; not doing things because that's what we have always done or that's what we were taught to do. We should live to beat our own paths, make our own decisions and question everything until the answers are found.
