Sin & Prejudice

We look at people, at their smile, the crease of their forehead, the look in their eyes, and decide we know them. We arrange strangers by class, hanging labels over the people we meet just moments after meeting them. We converse with them momentarily, watching their lips move, measuring up their fashion sense and sizing up their intelligence all in the same time that we sort them into categories and damn them there forever. Or at least until they prove us wrong. We separate people into leagues, by size, ego and beauty.

And then we wonder why people do it to us.

The greatest injustice, by far, is the unfairness of being charged with a crime you didn’t commit. The prejudiced scorns cut the deepest. Searing like a knife to a chest that bears a heart that was misunderstood.

In simple, it sucks, a whole lot, to be misunderstood. Taken for a person you never were and never plan to be. It sucks when people have drawn boundaries for you, whispering out loud the things you’d do and the things they suppose you’ve done, who you are and who you ought to be. Determining, by the bat of an eye lash, or the raise of a brow, what you’re like, and what you certainly aren’t.

It’s so easy, but so foolish to guess who people are based on the superficial facades they cast.

We are too complicated to be read only by our faces. Far too intricate to be sorted by the first thing that escapes our lips. Nervous giggles don’t tell you what makes a person laugh and tearless eyes can’t say what makes them cry. Pictures aren’t worth a thousand words and words aren’t worth a thing. The only way to know a person is to get to know them. To touch them. To speak to their heart, like it isn’t the most cliché thing to say or do. To look into their eyes, and not see a shape or a color, just a person who is greater than their outer walls project.