Thursday, April 5, 2012

Standards of Universality

I don't require the whole world to be like me. I only demand that I be given the opportunity to carve out a little piece of it where I can live the way I want to.

And having universal standards - like, you can't be naked in public, or only women are allowed to wear dresses, or sex must absolutely be kept behind closed doors at all times - gets in the way of that. It gets in the way of freedom.

The only thing that matters is whether the people living under those standards want to. And the irony is that you might argue that no decent person could want to live under those standards voluntarily, but where is your concern for people like me who are being forced to live under YOUR standards involuntarily? Where is my rescue squad?

You don't really care about the people you want to "help", you only care that they live the way you want them to. As soon as we start saying that people have to like this or live like that, we are silencing people's voices who don't agree, and shoving words in their mouths to suit our agenda.

And it doesn't make a difference whether we're speaking for persons of a certain race/nationality, a certain sex/gender, or even a certain age. In each case we're disregarding their own voices, as individuals and not as demographics. We're putting words in their mouths, and if they don't say what we want them to say, we rationalize it away, saying that they've been deceived, or that they don't know what's good for them, and that we know better.

I don't want the whole world to live the way I do, I just want people to give me a chance to find a niche where I CAN live the way I want, with others like me, in peace. Peace, not conflict. And the notion of universal standards, that we raise people to adopt, bars that from happening.

Think tolerance, and diversity. Not intolerance and conformity.

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