I need to explain something before I started this blog. Almost every night, my pain level wakes me up. I try to avoid getting up and taking more pain medication. To go back to sleep, I listen to the radio with a pillow speaker so as not to wake my wife. The local National Public Radio station streams the BBC all night long. The disadvantages of that are that some programs are so interesting I want to stay awake to listen to them.
With that explanation out of the way, I wanted to comment on something. The shows seem to cover an endless number of topics. They range from these stories about Islamic terrorists beheading children in Africa to some fascinating science shows. The former are liable to keep me awake out of a sense of repulsion. The latter keep me awake because they are so interesting. Because it’s radio, I only have the sound of their voices to form an image of the speaker. Some accents are easy to identify, such as those from India. Occasionally as the science show ends, they will name the speaker and their country. The other evening I was listening to a program on paleontology research. I was surprised to learn the speaker was a professor from an African University discussing a dinosaur find in Africa. I had thought they were either talking about a north or south American discovery. I never thought about an African University having a program in paleontology.
I realized I was discounting an entire continent. I was thinking of it as a backward continent with all its peoples trapped in the past. Even worse, I thought the whole continent had nothing worth adding to the world except some raw materials. I was guilty of profiling the entire continent. I had to sit down and think about why this had happened. As a child, there were the Tarzan movies. They had formed a picture in my mind of people running around in just loincloths in the jungles. However, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew about the Sahara desert. I knew about Egyptian culture and the pyramids.
I came to the conclusion that your earliest impressions of something are likely to color that place or people for the rest of your life. I never understood why some thoughts so negatively of Native Americans. I remembered one of my grandfathers sitting down and talking to a Native American in a language I didn’t understand. They would laugh and carry on as friends. It was an early impression that formed my view of Native Americans. I think we all need to be wary of impressions formed early in our lives.
