My perspective

I was thinking the other day that every opinion, every perception I have of the world is pretty subjective. I see a person, an idea, a situation and when I process it, it is subjective to my past experiences, and just generally the way I view life. You take a situation where two people possessing unique features and characteristics, have an altercation and the way I look at it is probably different than the way Tom or Dick or Harry looks at it. What would it be like to get inside somebody else's head for a day? Weird, I guess. Weird to see how that person perceives how I relate to other people. I wouldn't really want to know what that person thought of me, though.

Being omnipotent and omniscient must be a very hard job.


I am reading an awesome book right now called "The Day They Came To Arrest The Book," by Nat Hentoff. It is a fictional account about some people in a community who try to get the novel Huckleberry Finn removed from the local high school curriculum and library because it is "racist," "sexist," and "immoral." Let me just note that I have read this book in it's entirety and I think this is absolute posh. Thank heavens they fully reinstated the book at the end.

If they censored Mark Twain from a public high school because a southern white boy used "racial insults" that were taught to him from birth and for episodes where two boys are without clothes because they're boys on a hot summer day and because the protagonist repeatedly "steals and lies," they might as well shut down the whole library. I'm certainly not saying everybody should go around using words that insult people just because they've heard them their entire lives, but when I read that book all I saw was a boy calling a person the name everybody told him he was supposed to use, while protecting that person when no one else would, and being a loyal friend. I do also understand why this book might offend black people. Incidentally, in the time of Mark Twain this book was banned from more than one library as being worthless literature.



See http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/canadian_tourism/49239