The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness” -Richard Wright, Black Boy

There is a lot of hate in this world. And given the recent happenings in our country, I can understand the anger, resentment, and frustrations that many Americans are feeling. I can also say that because I was born into the majority class, I have also felt a lot of "white guilt". For others, discussion of the racial divide that still separates ethnic groups by social-economic classes, is very volatile. The amount of mud slinging by people who are found among friends lists on Facebook, is saddening. We take everything too personally, without taking the time to generate a discussion about how we move forward.

We need to be more accepting of the fact that world is not the way we would like it. That many people for various reasons are too often denied rights that many of us, including myself take for granted. We are too willing to point fingers, instead of turning the finger around at ourselves, and asking, "What can I do to make it better?"

Gandhi, once said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world", but how many of us are really doing enough in our own lives to be a change for the better? We make a lot of excuses about not having time, or we chose to look the other way. But perhaps a way to make a change for the better is to acknowledge the good, the bad, and the ugly in ourselves?