Writer’s Quote Wednesday – Prejudice

Image borrowed from Silver Threading’s blog

This is my latest contribution to Writer’s Quote Wednesday, hosted by Colleen Chesebro of silverthreading.com. This week, I also want to link it back to Ronovan’s Be Wonderful on Wednesday (#BeWoW) share. I encourage you all to follow these links to discover some stimulating posts.

Please forgive me for being a little self-indulgent this week, and also for being greedy.

I feel the need to use one of my own quotes which I feel is very appropriate to the times in which we are living, and especially in Europe. I want to combine that with my own personal life motto which I formulated when I was fifteen years old. So I am giving you two for the price of one, and the price you must pay is just to read this post, so it is almost free.

These follow on from the quote that I used last week from Thomas Edison:

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

My own quote for this week is:

“I only have only one prejudice, and that is against those people who are prejudiced.”

Diversity

It upsets me that there is so much open prejudice in the world these days, much of it whipped up by the media and by politicians. I am very happy to have travelled, lived and worked all over the world. I have witnessed much. Being an emotional man, I can be equally stirred to tears by witnessing great acts of kindness as I can by seeing gross cruelty. I make no apologies to regular readers of my blog for repeating that statement.

I am very proud of my step-mother, Sheila Greenfield, who was the founding headmistress of the very first integrated school in Northern Ireland: Lagan College. Her ethos has always been, “There will be no prejudice, of any kind, in my school!” What she is saying does not just cover race, colour and creed, but also covers physical and mental ability and disability. It also covers every other difference between two humans that you could possibly think of, no matter how trivial.

Integrated schooling in Northern Ireland has made a huge contribution to the peace process in that troubled province. My belief is that it is one of the major keys to eliminating conflict throughout the world. So PLEASE, let’s have no prejudice!

Care for them all

And now for the motto that I promised to share with you all at the beginning of this post. The event that prompted me to conceive my personal motto occurred on one of the many occasions that I ran away from home as a teenager. I found myself in a South East Asian city outside a beautiful palace. This was the first time that I ever noticed a huge contrast between rich and poor. I cried for about two hours before spending all the cash that I had in my pockets at the market to buy some of these people a few bags of food.

As I made my way home, with my tail suitably between my legs and my eyes still filled with tears, the following came to me:

“One world, one people: care about them all.”

You’ll see this motto repeated at the foot of my profile on this blog.