Week Seven: Counter Productive

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher took a book away.  I was informed it couldn't possibly be my book; that it was too advanced for me and I was much too stupid to read it.  The teacher refused to return the book until my parents were called, and the principal got involved.  I got told I shouldn't read in class.

This seemed…odd.  Very odd.  In fact, it seemed rather counterproductive, the whole not being told to read while in school thing.  A lot of things in life are this way.  On the surface, they seem entirely counterproductive.  Of course, the teacher meant I shouldn't read non-class material in class.  It was disrespectful of me to do so, and now that I’m old enough I can see that.  But the wording…

One should always be very careful with the words they use, I believe.

In life, people do things that don’t make one wit of sense.  In fact, they do things that, simply put, are senseless!  This happens more than you would think, and there is very little anyone can do about it.  People simply don’t make sense.  It’s hard to deal with at times.  Harder to understand.

The older you get, the more often it feels like you encounter people like this.  People who run counter-productive to everything you know and thing you understand.  This is not wrong of them.  This is simply them.  Who they are as a person.  Everyone is different in that way.

There are people out there that confuse the dickens out of me.  They do things or say things that seem out of place or odd.  There are people who confuse me on their gender, or on their opinion.  I know people who had a different opinion every day of the week on the color the sky was, it seemed.  Charlie Brown would call them wishy washy.  I call them confused.

Despite this.  Despite how counter-productive I think they behave, they are, in fact, completely fine.  They are even necessary.  Recently, people have chosen to protest or even have been driven to form angry mobs over disagreements on a horrible movie.  It insults their religion, and so they believe this is an excuse to harm and hurt others, to destroy property and cause general chaos.

This seems counter-productive to me.  It seems as if they ought to not do this.  As if, if they truly cared, they would find a different method.  Instead, they do something else, something I find odd, but they find right.  Something, in this world, that is, however distressing, necessary.

Mankind is odd.  But we must all be different, must have different responses to continue to grow as a species, as people, and as individuals.  For mankind to thrive, we need to disagree on the small things, and agree on the major.

The major things are what all people agree on, though everyone’s actions do not always agree.

Among these are that all life is precious, children should be protected and cherished, and peace is desireable.

Now if only we could agree on that peace.

One Final Byte:  It is our differences that make life precious.