Showing understanding toward others

ALEX BOGER Columnist

We often get caught up in our own little world, filled with only our friends and personal beliefs.

We don’t go out of our way to understand other people.

I firmly believe humans are, at their core, good, and that most hate in the world comes from a lack of understanding.

When people are raised in a sheltered environment with narrow-minded influences, their understanding of people who aren’t like them is very limited. They have never gotten to know anyone from varying demographics, and their upbringing has left them scared to engage with others different from them.

All of this can be avoided if we just seek to understand and empathize with people of different races and cultures.

By understanding what drives the beliefs and biases of someone from another group, it helps deepen your understanding of them as humans.

In my belief, all humans want a peaceful world.

And the best way for us to achieve this perfect world we crave is to show understanding and compassion to all people.

If we can all extend the same compassion to everyone as we do to our close family and friends, the world will be a much better place for it.

Conflict can be a destructive force. You cannot build a better planet by destroying it.

Some people will say that some humans are just bad, that some people are hard-wired to want to kill people or steal from them.

But the issue with this kind of thinking is that it’s rarely an internal force that drives people when committing these types of acts. When someone is interviewed after committing a hate crime or terrorist attack, they frequently claim political, financial or religious motives for their attacks.

Many of these attacks come from a misunderstanding about someone or a group of people that is proliferated by one’s peer group.

So what does this mean for you? What I am trying to say is, before you judge someone, try talking to them.

Try going to a Black Students Alliance meeting. Give the Feminist Equality Movement a try. Attend a Gender and Sexualities Alliance meeting.

Seek to deepen your understanding of the people around you.

Remember that when you talk to someone, they have blood and skin just like yours. They are just another person who has their own beliefs and views and feelings.

Another living, breathing human being.

In the end, all we humans have is each other. So why spend your time hating, when you could spend your time understanding and empathizing?

Alex Boger is an agriculture & biosystems engineering graduate student at SDSU and can be reached at [email protected]