My dear daughter,
Here’s a teaching I hold dear:
“Don’t take no shit off fools. An’ you judge a person by what’s in ‘em, not how they look. An’ you do the right thing. You gotta be one of the good guys, son: ‘cause there’s way too many of the bad.”
- John Custer to Jesse Custer in Preacher
That’s from a comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, with cover art by Glenn Fabry. It’s pure art. I have all the issues in English and hard cover. Some day they will be yours.
Now, it’s not really that easy knowing what is the right thing in every situation; many people do wrong believing they are doing good. The world is a complex place and don’t let anyone else convince you otherwise. It’s hard to even start conceptualizing right and wrong, good and bad, good and evil. To conceptualize should be your first objective. Maybe we will get to that discussion in time.
If you have to judge someone, remember: appearance is not important. Treating people according to appearance has led to the worst crimes in humankind’s history. Behavior, clothing style, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, neither of those make a person less of a person either. What matters is what a person thinks and how they act.
Probably all prejudices have an evolutionary root. While we were nomads threading the world in small bands, appearances helped identify threats and recognize those of your own group.
None of this is important anymore. Just as we have evolved to cooperate within small groups, today we know cooperation is fundamental and positive in any context. We also know every living human is related and everybody shares the fate of the world we live in.
Since we can achieve such conclusions through reason, it’s our obligation to actively fight off prejudices and work towards global cooperation.
Know this: there are no different races in humankind, no breeds, no considerable differences in mental or physical capacity whatsoever. No ethnicity has inherent natural negative or positive propensities – it’s societies that exert pressure upon individuals.
Love,
Dad
Aspergers Dad 