Ignorance and Isolationism Are a Choice…What Do You Choose?

If you don’t believe in an open, inclusive, diverse society, please pull yourself up by your bootstraps and buy a ticket for you and everyone in your family so that you can return to the place where you came from.

Go back to Ireland. Go back to Mali. Go back to Norway. Go back to Iran, Sweden, Peru, and South Africa.

Though let me prepare you for what you are going to find there. You are going to find a diverse people, because that is our world today. Nigerians are in Germany. Bangladeshis are in Australia. Yemeni people live and thrive in the United States.

No matter where you go, you are going to find people that look other than you, your children, and your ancestors. Again, because that is the world today.

The world is evolving away from isolationist, tribal, exclusionary cultural practices, into one that deals in the currencies of dialogue, exchange, and greater personal and cultural perspective. (I’d like to say evolved here, but the world certainly doesn’t feel evolved—in fact, at times it feels as if it’s devolving—right now.)

You can choose to avoid this and willfully burrow away from progress in your troglodytic cave. You can hunker down in your ignorance and dream nostalgic about a day when things were simpler, where people in your life looked and thought and believed more like you.

In this day and age, that is a choice. That ignorance is your choice. But make no mistake, it is a completely chosen ignorance. The world is small enough now that just about every single human being knows of all the myriad differences that exist in religious beliefs, political views, skin color, and sexual orientation.

Choosing to be ignorant and think that your way is the right way, and the only right way is your choice.

That is a sad state of being. That feels like uselessly whiling away the time until you slip off this plane of existence. You are missing the great gifts that this world has to offer you.

Choose the other. Choose to see that you could be any other person on the face of this Earth. What truly separates you from another? You could’ve been born in anyone else’s place, time, and station. Anyone else could’ve been born in yours.

Elect to see that we are all the same in that basic sense. We all start the same.

You don’t need to buy that ticket back to your perceived homeland. No one else needs to go back to theirs.

Please, join us. Seek perspective. Revel in the differences. Learn about something other than what you know.

Resist. Love. Understand. Feel. Hurt. Embrace. Rebel. Fight. Love. Love. Love.