Prejudices are an interesting mindset based primarily, I believe, on a less than healthy personal self concept by those who feel the emotion. If a person feels good about themselves and feel that life has treated them fairly and that they have progressed as well as they had expected, they usually have an absence of hatred as well. Hatred, in my opinion, is an outward expression of how people feel about themselves. They need to find someone or something to blame for their life’s frustrations, and sometimes it is directed toward whomever is handy and sometimes it is directed toward a group or groups that have been a common target for hate, and they just join the club. Sometimes hatred is handed down from a frustrated parent to a frustrated child and is a hard mindset to break or turn away from.
There is a story that portrays the lack of logic in hatred that goes like this: A plane was loading passengers and preparing to take off when the Jewish pilot and a Chinese co-pilot came aboard. The two had never flown together before and there appeared to be a natural dislike for each other. After entering the cockpit they checked the instruments and taxied down the runway and finally took off. As they reached altitude, the pilot set the plane on autopilot and laid back in his seat. There was a brief pause, and then he said, “I hate Chinese.” The co-pilot responded by saying,
“Why do you hate Chinese?” To that the pilot said, “Because they bombed Pearl Harbor.” The Chinese co-pilot said, “Chinese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor; that was the Japanese.” To that the pilot said,
“Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese; they’re all the same.” After a few minutes of silence, the co-pilot said, “I hate Jews.” To that the pilot queries, “Why do you hate Jews?” “Because they sank the Titanic.”
The pilot said, “Where did you get that idea? The Jews didn’t sink the Titanic; it was an iceberg that sank the Titanic.” To that the co-pilot said, “Goldberg, Greenberg, Rosenberg, Iceberg, they’re all the same!” The reference to iceberg in the co-pilot’s analogy was very appropriately based on the icy statement by the pilot in his introductory greeting to him. Prejudicial hatred doesn’t generally have much more logic to it than that story.
The answer to prejudicial emotion is an understanding of the universal brotherhood of man and that we are all God’s children sent here for a purpose. That we all have the same needs, physically, socially, emotionally and mentally, is a given, regardless of the color of our skin or the language we speak, etc. We should all have immediate compassion for another human being when they suffer, for whatever reason. May God bless us with an abundance of charity, for without charity life and the human experience is nothing more than sounding brass and tinkling symbols (nothing).