Timeline photos
This guy stole my backpack! Fortunately, I have cameras in this area and I was able to get him on video in the act. It turns out it was me that stole my own backpack. I had wandered off with it to do another job and I left it in that area and then spent 20 minutes tracking it down. This video was proof that it was me that took the backpack. I would say 90% of the time I think something is stolen by a homeless person it’s actually me just misplacing it. We have some serious unpacking to do with our own prejudices. They are so ingrained in us that we barely know they are there. One of my personal prejudices is thinking a homeless person stole something of mine when most of the time it was just me leaving it laying around somewhere and walking off without it. We have our own Israeli / Palestinian war going on in my building. Some of the wealthy upstairs people believe the poor downstairs people are smoking m∃th and it is smelling up the entire building. The problem is, I don’t think the wealthy upstairs people have the slightest idea what m∃th smells like. And they have no interest in finding out what it smells like. (As a person who has had the privilege to get sit in a m∃th smoking circle a few times (they even will sometimes offer me a hit which I’m truly honored that they would include me like that, but I’m currently straight edge so I don’t use any drugs other than caffeine and my antidepressant) I can tell you it barely has any smell at all. When I’m really close to it, it gives me a metallic taste in my mouth. But I really can’t describe a significant smell. P0t is WAY more pungent and can sometimes give me a slight headache.) We first must learn and accept that prejudices are completely normal and make perfect sense for survival of our families. You typically get a prejudice one of two ways. Either you are born into it and your family teaches you to hate certain people. Or you learn it from friends, experiences or the media. It’s all just fear. I can’t over express how fearful humans are. We are deeply, deeply terrified of nearly everything. It would be sweet and adorable if we also didn’t have the most massively brutal weapons of mass destruction to annihilate all the people that scare the living sh!t out of us. So first, we need to become aware of and accept our own prejudices as normal and very human. Then we must learn to accept the prejudices of other people who have been taught to be afraid of people that seem perfectly harmless to us. And then we must begin the long and slow process of deconstructing the brainwashing of our own bigotries. I assure you, you have a lifetime of work to do on yourself before you worry about fixing the thoughts of other people. MOST PEOPLE, regardless of race, gender, age, political affiliation, or religion are just like you: trying to get by as best they can while the winds of life knock them around. MOST PEOPLE are decent and mean well. Like 99% of people do not mean any harm. If you want to find people to hate I’m sorry to say you are going to need to do it person by person, one at a time. And when you get to know them this way you are going to find out that they have very valid reasons for the way they act and think. I’m sorry to say, but you are going to find it nearly impossible to genuinely hate anyone at all.