10 May 2011

finding the cure

I am so utterly tired of testing. I have had more than 10 tests in the past week - AP exams, finals, state-mandated tests, and other useless tests that are just made because people who run this board of "education" got bored and decided to make up a bunch of tests.
Today was none other than the French exam. Four and a half hours. I should be paid to do this. Listening, reading, grammar, essay, and speaking. It was a grueling, silent French marathon in a desk. Borderline torture.
After that misery, I got an email from SurveyMonkey. They send me surveys when they have a new one, I take it, and they donate the money to an charity of my choice, in this case a hunger organization. Most of the surveys are political. "How do you feel about Policy X?" and "What's your position on the current Y affairs?" Those kinds of questions.
This survey, the one I took today, was all about racism.
We think racism is a thing of the past; some archaic, Civil War era white supremacist idea. But it's still prevalent today.
The only good thing is that the people at my school are not racist. I don't know one racist at my school. Perhaps there are some, but perhaps not. And my classes are filled with people from different countries, states, ethnicities and backgrounds. I even have a girl in my French class who moved here this year from Belgium!
One of the other survey questions was, "How can we combat racism?" I don't really like that they said "combat", but as my teacher says, "that's neither here nor there". Most of the answer choices said to enforce laws more heavily, or make worse punishments for violators of anti-racist laws.
We aren't supposed to force laws upon people. Laws don't prevent things from happening. They can hinder them, but they do not eliminate the possibility of something going wrong. What we need to be doing is educating people. Racism stems from ignorance, and the remedy for ignorance is education. If we can teach people about different people, they will understand each other better. And this leads to a happier world. Imagine if we all loved each other . . .
On Oprah one time, this guy was talking about racism. And he said that if her cut his arm and an African-American cut his arm, and they poured their blood into separate cups, no one could tell the difference between the two. While it's a little graphic, it's completely true.
One of the things that would be great to see is if everyone could accept each other as if we all had the same colored skin, or as if we were all the same. Because essentially we all are the same. We all come from the same place, and we all are humans. We even share common cultures, and sometimes, the same nation, state, or even neighborhood.
We have to find a remedy for one of our world's largest problems. And only we can fix the problem we made.

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