Kindness Matters

Being a good person ultimately boils down to one thing: how well you treat others; race, social status, and religion are not the deciding factors they are made out to be because we are all born with a good and loving mind and can be friends with everyone. Not a single person has ever been born with a mind that is already ‘mean’ or ‘not kind’: it is the treatment of others that turns someone bitter. The statement, ‘All People are the Same and Should be treated the same has been tested many times throughout history.

As stated in the bible, ‘There is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women: you are all in union with Jesus Christ, (Galatians 3.28).” These statements seem so easy and understandable, but many times people let hatred and judgment get in the way and take over. We have such a responsibility for others through how we treat them, if we all treat each other with kindness and respect it will come back around. There should be no reason at all we treat our classmates with any less respect than how we treat our family members.

Many people find these statements favorable and right but on the controversy, some people believe that it is almost impossible to treat everyone with the same respect and love for which you would treat a family member. Some examples of these types of people we can not treat with the same respect would be a criminal, rapist, or murderer. All these types of people are not accepted by society and are therefore seen in a different light and because of this, we treat these people with a lower amount of respect. This leads me onto the topic of how we should treat people in a school environment, no one you are learning with has committed any crimes of this degree, so therefore we have no reason at all to treat any other student or teacher with any lower respect then we treat our family members. In personal experience, I find it near impossible to treat everyone with the same respect and kindness, especially in school, due to the fact of how we see the world. What is the first thing your brain does when you meet someone new? Your brain judges the person and this judgment is what leads us to how we treat this person. Of course, I’m going to treat my close friends differently than people I barely know. But even though we find this so hard to do we must push ourselves to treat everyone equally, for this is what will make us move on as a united society.

I know everyone has heard this line from the bible at least once in their life, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’. This idea of equalization is so well known and ancient that one would think that we, as a society, should finally understand how to treat everyone the same after all these years. Yet is so hard for some people to grasp due to the fact that plain and simple, the world is not an equal place. Although this is the overwhelming truth about the world we have to see past this and overcome those thoughts of thinking you are higher or better than another human.

Now one might ask, what are the benefits of treating others equally? When we get to learn about others and when we get to respect others’ similarities and differences we learn so much more about the world and all its opportunities. These opportunities can be friendships, work prospects, travel possibilities, or a wider understanding of the world in which we live. People who are scared of others are not so because they have any sense of rejection towards them but because they’re not sure how to go about communicating with them and also because they fear that their own little ‘cocoon of protection’ might be threatened. This is simply not true. What is important is that everybody is entitled to a viewpoint or opinion and we should respect that right even if we don’t necessarily agree with it.

Tolerance is the key but you can still maintain your own identity and still have valid viewpoints. Remember, even identical twins have their own individual experiences and opinions and you probably don’t agree with everything your parents or children say but do that necessarily compromise you?

There are many things we can do to move towards accepting other people’s opinions and respecting our differences. At a very basic level, we should treat others with the same degree of respect as we would like to be treated ourselves. We should embrace our differences, not be afraid of them and we should never judge a person on our first impression which is often about how he or she looks. Taking the time to get to know the person within is a far better indicator than pre-judging them on appearances alone.

Getting to truly know a new person who we may feel is quite different from us can be a very rewarding experience. It’s true that when we’re looking to make friends or start relationships that we tend to gravitate towards people we believe are similar in outlook to ourselves but in restricting ourselves to that mindset, we can often miss out on many interesting experiences.          

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