A Letter to a Friend

Dear friend,

I thought I exactly knew what I wanted to say in this letter, but then I realized It is way harder when you actually start to write things down.

I'm not really sure if you care about people, and by people I mean human beings over all. or you just think you care about them, but you just care about a group of them. or you just act like you care and you consciously use caring as a tool. there even might be other ways to think about it. and I want to say that it's not really important to me.

I think I have to clarify what I mean by caring:

by caring I mean caring about how you treat people, how others treat each other. and how you and other people treat the environment around you. and how you care about the things that individuals or groups of people identify themselves with. things like race, sex, a favorite soccer team, anything.

I don't want to get into the actual ethical discourse of the things mentioned above. In my opinion, these are not the most important things in the world.

I think it is really important to be consistent about how much you say that you care about stuff, and how much you act on it. I think we cannot be completely consistent with our actions. but it would suck if we talk about something a lot, and then we don't act on it in an obvious way.

there are lot's of examples of inconsistency. and you are smart,  you'll get it.

It sucks when organizations , especially non profits, have a goal of creating justice, and equity, and stuff like that. and then they don't even try to achieve that within their employees. or a really small group of people that they might have to deal with. most of them don't think of it that way. when scale changes, people's moral values change and it sucks. I say it sucks because I think part of this is because we human's are the way we are. it just sucks, like a whole list of other stuff that suck and we might have to deal with them for a long time. anyways...

one other example is  when someone hates racism... or some notion of this kind.
what is racism anyway ? It is probably the fact that people cannot understand that even though a group of people might have a lot of similarities, culturally and physically, It does not mean that they are all completely the same.

The problem is that even though this is really easy to understand, we tend to generalize groups of any kind. I mean for us, apples are all apples. shit is shit. and the same thing happens when we try to think about a group of people. and then suddenly , we treat them like apples, or trees. you see what I'm saying?

you see? I  can get why racism happens. I'm not trying to say what I said was the best explanation ever though. remember! this is just a letter.

you know what is really easier to understand ? the fact that Individuals are different. in any other way you can imagine. and I'm talking on a different scale now. there is no group of people that we have to care about and treat well. Just our friends and colleagues which are probably from very different places and backgrounds.

individuals are way more different than groups of people. and treating individuals (I'm emphasizing on this word on purpose) with presumptions, is even more wrong, because its way easier to understand the fact that people are different. again ! as individuals.

so if you constantly think about racism, or sexism, or feminism, and then you try to consciously be understanding of these groups of people. you should think about the way you interact with your friends even more frequently.

Now to finish up, my very very dear friend. I gotta say. I understand that it is really hard to do that. really really hard. and it depends on your moral standards. If you personally have high moral standards towards groups of people. you should think about the way you treat people around you. to be consistent.

this was an observation,  a lot of  of people and I care about you  and we might even talk about it someday.

sincerely ,
A. K