Heaven

If there’s heaven, I believe it looks more or less like this:

A bunch of kids who are naturally dressed in different skin colours and physiques and who speak the same language but in different accents helping each other towards a common goal.

I was in heaven last week.

I went to a play group observation at a pre-school here as part of my placement duties. Every one of the kids—kids with autism, intellectual disabilities, physical disabilities, different accents—has their own physical and personality characteristics, yet they blend well with each other, sharing fun and cooperating, oblivious to these differences.

It’s such a moving scene to see.

We all have been those little angels. I'm sure even Hitler was once an angelic little boy who played with Jewish kids or adored Jewish girls ni those early years before his traumatized failure to attach to his father turned him into the most infamous racist of all times. However, the sad thing is, at some point of our life we gradually grow up unlearning that sort of acceptance and our innate skills to accommodate differences, instead learning to hate a certain group of people – the obese, the geek, the nerds, the ethnics groups, the immigrants, the rich, the poor just because they’re not our breed. At some point, difference between people, be it political views, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, skin color, accents or fashion sense, has become a threat to us.

That hatred is not inherited but learnt, from us adults: our own prejudice, our unexamined judgments, and our distorted sense of superiority. Our tolerance and acceptance wear and our prejudice grows as we age because we believe we’ve seen enough to generalize and known enough to judge others.

Our inability to handle differences and our desire to colonize our own beliefs find its roots in many conflicts in human history. But history will always repeat itself because we’re too arrogant to realize that deep down we are all the same.

When I looked at the kids, I wished they wouldn't become us in the future—becoming some sort of -ists (as in racist, sexist, sizist...).

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I've won the Travel Award from the conference organizer, yaaaayyyy :) and my conference paper was actually ranked first among the three awardees (one of whom is a PhD student)--my highlight of the week despite getting drown in tides of work and failing to keep my thesis work on track. Now here comes the problem, how am I gonna splash ALL the awards $$$ on that trip to Canberra...

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唔...為甚麼最近寫的日記都是那種老生常談的想法，毫無個性可言...