My wife and I just went to see the movie Little - the new movie by Marsai Martin. It was a good movie and the narrative was about a lady who had been treated unfairly by peers at a young age.
In an attempt to defend herself from being hurt in the future, she worked hard to achieve success and “hurt people before they could hurt her” by being so mean to everyone who worked with and for her.
Being magically turned into a child made the protagonist realize that she had been hurting a lot of other people in a quest to defend herself.
Before going for the movie, my wife and I had talked about a post I found on twitter where a lady questions the sanity of other ladies who try to get in shape for their wedding ceremonies. She claims ladies try to get in a good shape to marry a man who eats carelessly and generalized to imply that this is always the case.
After seeing this post, I was curious to know what had led to such conclusion she made about other women. Taking a Freudian psychological approach, I dug into her past and found that she had gone through a divorce. She had been hurt by a man and I feel sorry about that. But that does not give her a right to go on social media judging other ladies. A lot of ladies get in shape before wedding ceremonies to have wedding photos that they are proud of. Their need is beyond anyone else’s on that and I know this as my wife and I prepare for our white wedding. Also, when did doing something for your partner become a wrong thing to do? I would do whatever my wife wants and she tries to do things for me as well to make our union a great one.
I took my worried concerns about the post to my wife and she replied saying:
Hurt people hurt (other) people.
I could not agree with this more and I think it stands as a major problem in our society today. With racial, political, and sexual orientation issues. Empathy is an attribute greatly lacking in a lot of humans and it takes a lot of self training to build some. We often make dispositional attribution of people we come across rather than weighing the factors around to make situational attribution.
As a black person of color, I’ve been judged a lot by my color rather than having people get to know me before making an informed decision about me. Similarly, I’ve seen other minorities judge other people in majority groups a lot because they are hurt from the effects we have suffered as minorities. Black people have suffered through history and we still experience racism, discrimination, and hate. However, we can easily hurt people by making quick actions on other people to defend ourselves.
In all situations, the majority groups need to have more empathy on the minorities and be kind to every human. Minority groups should also be empathetic and only address those who have proven to be insensitive and insouciant about our feelings.