Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Patience's Saturday picture. This one is of our family, showing how we blend and blur and reflect one another. We had gone for a short visit to a college town I hadn't been to in almost 20 years. I found it completely changed. All of the rough edges had been polished smooth and pretty. It showed in the high prices of everything. What had once been a dirt parking lot with slightly dilapidated Word War II era houses was now a paved, metered parking lot ringed by modern strip shopping centers filled with trendy restaurants and shops. The cars, once older model student cars, were now flashy new SUVs. Dark areas, such as an alley, were now well-lighted, and the alley was cleverly named with a fancy sign over the entrance. The restaurant bar they wanted to go to for old time's sake---because it had once figured prominently in their daily lives---clung bravely to its character, amid gentrified competition. The exterior was splintery and rough, the tables plain and unbalanced, coat...

Prejudice : ageism, animosity, antipathy, apartheid, aversion, bigotry, chauvinism, contemptuousness, discrimination, disgust, dislike, enmity, illiberality*, injustice, jaundiced eye, mind-set, misjudgment, narrow-mindedness, one-sidedness, partiality, preconceived notion, racism, repugnance, revulsion, sexism, umbrage, unfairness, xenophobia * I'd say call Webster's here, but errr...this is from the dictionary . What's your gut reaction to the above words? My gut roils, and not pleasantly. Each word carries a fairly bad---perhaps even nasty---connotation. Those words are the rationale we use to harm others. I'm not picturing a billy club to a head per se (although there is historical precedent). I'm picturing less obvious harm as well, such as dimming someone's soul. The thesaurus asks us to consider: a person's bias is based on facts, but prejudice occurs without a person knowing or examining the facts. The facts. We've studied facts in school, cla...