Racist me

I'm pretty proud of the fact that I've considered myself non-racist. I'm proud of my upbringing, which brought me up to realize that anyone can be anything with enough work. I could have been an astronaut, I could have been a pauper. Every person makes their own way.

Sometimes I'll spend time at Yahoo's chat rooms (even though I have at least a whole blog's worth of bitches to go along with that.) I've been considered a regular in more than one Yahoo chat room. I'm not proud or ashamed of that fact. It's a good way to find out information and meet new people. I still don't feel I've gotten a good answer to my ultimate question though...

If you are in a jet moving faster than the speed of sound and you are in front of the engines do you hear the engine noise? I think you would because of the relative speed between you and the engine (0) but most people say you wouldn't hear the noise.

I detour on the tangent because this is a hard issue for me to cope with.

Since Yahoo got into the lawsuit and went to no user created rooms there has been a massive influx of non-English speaking chatters. All are of the middle eastern character set although I'm sure they speak different dialects and may even use different characters. I'm not well-versed enough to know the difference. Most people, even myself, called them derogatory names at first. There were times that we did little but to come up with new names to call them.

I was particularly drunk one night and ended up in a voice chat with some guy that was using the N word non-sparingly. It was a bitch and moan chat of sorts and said that right up front. I don't recall the name of it but it was clear from the start that insults were the name of the game. Belting out racial slurs doesn't make it into my list of insults. Those are fighting words for me. It wasn't long before I closed that chat session.

I can't control anyone but myself. I knew that was not somewhere I wanted to be. After a weeek or so I went back to Yahoo Chat, to my regular haunts. The middle easterners were there in force and the name calling commenced, even though they likely didn't know they were the brunt of the English comments.

I started to think about the previous chat experience and started to put 2 and 2 together. I was agreeing with the ire of the room about non-english characters in our chat room. We were there for a particular purpose, genealogy, and the non-english were there to find partners for love of whatever means. As time went on I realized I was being racist, or at the very least prejudiced.

My goal has never been to "be equal to blacks" or "be nice to hispanics" but to be non-racist. I realized that night I was as racist as Joe-Bob and I had to stop that. Since then I've had a lot of time to think and I now look at the whole war situation in a much different light. I also hope to never catch myself in that situation again. If I do I hope I realize what I'm doing because I really do believe we all have the same rights. I would not want somebody to think of me as less than I am because of where I live, what color I am, what god I worship, or any other such nonsense.

To the middle eastern people of the world, I am sorry. I have tried to amend my ways and I hope to see your side of the story from now on. I hope I have not wronged you forever. We all make mistakes.