Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Pigeonholed

You know the people who stereotype other people and claim that they don’t?  I am one of those people.  For the remainder of this little word jumble I will not deny the fact that I am one to generalize.  Is generalize the right word? Maybe pigeonhole would be more appropriate? Or maybe typecast? Or is it label?  Fuck it, those all mean the same thing and I do it all. 

If you do it too you can tell me, I won’t think any less of you, all I will do is put you in a category.  Don’t worry; I am right there beside you.  We can go to self-help meetings for people who categorize people and judge them.  We will sit in a room full of people just like us, people who all hate each other because they think the kind of people that would attend such a meeting must be troubled and terrible.  I will be sitting next to you annoying the fuck out of you because I remind you of what you are and don’t want to be.  At the meeting we will talk about getting to know people for who they really are and how to not judge a book by its cover.  We are all health conscious smokers and coffee drinkers.  We all share the same love for sitting on a bench in a mall.  We all know a lot of hilarious racial jokes, and we all know that all Jewish people have the same nose and that all black people absolutely love chicken.  We will go around in a circle and say “Hello my name is Blank and I stereotype.” Everyone in the circle will respond with a “That would be your name.” The leader of the group will assign us a “buddy” based on who she thinks we will get along best with, one who we call in times of need or just when we need a friend.  I would guess that we would not be assigned as each other’s “buddy”, you just don’t seem like the right match for me.  After meetings we will all go out to the parking lot and silently guess whose car is whose and think to ourselves, “typical” when the big man in the plaid gets into his truck and the woman wearing the mock turtle neck gets into her van. 

At the meetings to follow we will realize that the man in the truck is surprisingly liberal and the woman with the van doesn’t have any kids.  “Well that’s strange,” we will all think to ourselves.  When the boy with the dreads tells us that he loves to hunt we will gasp. And when the girl with her tits hanging out of her deep V-neck tells us she is a virgin we think she is lying.  After the 6th meeting we will all start to feel like we have reached a point of enlightenment.  We will feel fresh and we will love everyone around us.  We will all vow to never judge another soul as long as we all shall live.  We will not think that just because someone is blonde they are dumb, or if someone is unemployed they are a dead-beat, or if someone wears a swastika they are a Nazi.  We will walk with straight backs and we will read the inside covers of books before we buy them.  One thing we won’t do is tell our peers that we attend a self-help group because they will think we have problems.  

1 comment:

  1. this is brilliant. especially the last paragraph. "One thing we won't do is tell our peers that we attend a self-help group because they will think we have problems."<--favorite!

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