Just some random thoughts for a Tuesday evening.  I’ve been thinking about this for a while, particularly in the wake of the events of recent years.

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In interacting with other people, our highest ethical and moral goal as individuals should be to treat everyone we encounter fairly, kindly, compassionately and without regard to their race, sex, ethnicity, whom they love or any other category into which we might be able to place them.  To treat them, in other words, as we would want to be treated ourselves.  

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We must strive to treat each other as individuals – as the people we see before us – rather than as avatars of any particular group.   This isn’t something which comes naturally to us as humans – we prefer to think in terms of groups or tribes.  We see it in bigotry as well as in well-intended, yet doomed, attempts to counteract bigotry.  But, each individual brings with them personal experiences, biases (both conscious and unconscious) and other traits which transcend whatever group(s) we may otherwise want to assign them to, making them each unique.  To approach or to consider individuals initially, primarily or even substantively as members of groups rather than as individuals denies them that uniqueness.  It will, over time, serve to engender resentment, aggravate prejudices, and will ultimately help no one.

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Our goal as a society must be to ensure that all individuals, regardless of anything else about them, have the opportunity to live their best lives and to achieve whatever their character, their intelligence, their ambition and their dedication can win them.  Anything less is unacceptable.