Have you seen one of these pop up in your Facebook feed?
These types of images/quotes are written by teenagers (at least I hope they are), but I see them passed around on adults’ walls all the time. The messages are clearly resonating beyond the hallways of our local high schools, so I think they are fair game for discussion here.
At first glance, this is just a good message about how we shouldn’t bully each other. Yay! Right? But when I read it, I immediately think: Why shouldn’t I be nice to these people regardless? Why does someone have to be getting beat up at home for me to feel bad and not want to push them down? Why does a fat girl need to starve herself for me to not insult her size? Why does a boy have to have a dying mother for me to not mock him for crying?
Fact: Someone doesn’t need to have a tragic or unfortunate thing going on in their lives for you to be nice to them. This probably seems obvious (maybe less so to a teenager), but I see these pop up on my friends’ walls a lot, and they aren’t teenagers. So if we’re going to pass on a message, let’s pass along a better one.
Here’s the thing: Aside from your close friends and family (and maybe not even with them), you have absolutely no idea what a person’s life is really like. If you see someone get out of a car in a handicapped parking spot and walk into a store with no visible handicap, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a legitimate reason why they have that parking pass. If you see a really fat person in a motorized scooter, you have no idea why they need it. You can make a bunch of assumptions – that person is lazy and stupid and eats twenty thousand calories a day and is costing us millions in health care dollars!!!1! But what if you actually met that person and you found out they have a debilitating disease that prevents them from moving without pain? You can’t possibly get to know everyone, so wouldn’t it just be easier to not judge them in the first place?
You can’t tell much of anything about a person’s life just by looking at them. And let’s be honest, you don’t want to be judged solely for what’s on your outside, either (at least, I hope you don’t). So, as one small step toward making the world a bit of a better place, I made this:
Share it!
