The next step to understand 'Difference'

We are all different. This is a very obvious acknowledged fact, especially in the era of globalization where we pursuit for the harmony of diversity. We have different hair colors, different races, different nationalities, and different personalities. Such differences make us unique, distinguished, and precious. Everyone has such differences – their own color and story; they all deserve to be respected and be valued. However, for a deeper comprehension and a farther step of the humanity, I believe it is a time when we have to change our focal point about the way of perceiving ‘difference.’

Through centuries of time, people fought for the civil right: making a general fact that a difference should not be the barrier for anyone. We have tried to understand the difference, and considered about how to handle it. We have treated a difference as a major criterion for understanding human. True, difference is essential part of a human. But, we have to move on: take ‘difference’ as a natural aspect, and acknowledge we can never understand a complex human being with one factor: gender, race, nationality, and etc. Sorting people with one difference - treating them with the ‘average’ data of that category - has a great limitation. We should stop delude ourselves that the ‘average’ data is the most appropriate statistic to comprehend ‘that kind’ of people. This leads all back to the fundamental idea, the starting sentence of this essay, “We are all different.” We are all different; that is why we should stop sorting differences and try to fit people in the ‘average’ of the sort. It is the next progress that we should head.

The podcast “The Lady Vanishes” illustrates the model of the female pioneer and the environment that limits equality between sexes. In Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, in the part of where it handles that sexism, it says, “That did not seem like a prejudice. It seemed like a fact.” This conveys very powerful message to us. We cannot deny that we are biased animals. We can never overcome such flaw; we can never be objective. But, we still need to try. We need to challenge ourselves to get over the boundaries that we constructed, listen to others, and see the world. We still need to try to be an open-hearted human to approach the very idea that we want to achieve: the ultimate truth. Yet we do not know what the ultimate truth is, but, it is a human instinct to struggle to find the answer about the myriad questions that the one inquires to the world.

It took hundreds of years to nod on the fact that human beings all have differences, and took another hundreds of years to accord that they all deserve a same respect and equal treatment. Now, we are facing the issue of handling such differences. We did not approach the perfect comprehension of differences; it is shown with the remaining segregation and heated controversies. I believe to truly embrace the fact every human differs from other people should never use the word ‘average,’ because such diverse cases of differences can never be explained with the ‘average.’ And I strongly believe that this is our next task for next hundreds of years to be achieved, and moreover to break our unacknowledged prejudice.