This is why I'm frustrated. I think we are obligated to our fellow man(men? humans? SEE! We can't even agree on the right forms of English anymore) to meet them in the middle and vice versa. But all of our lofty thoughts of everlasting peace between nations crumble when we open up a textbook, or see any foreign character (letters, not Apu) surrounded by it's own kind.Yes hombre, our curiosity of new worlds and visions of exotic swimsuit models who nearly faint at the provocative, yet silky, pronunciations we slide off our well traveled tongues fade fast when it dawns on us that we don't have the first clue of what's going on.
But Humans, still animals, can get hostile when confronted with utter confusion and a sense of displacement from our natural habitat. Spanish classrooms can subjectively be worlds away from our comfort zones if we are held under scrutiny by a speaker with authority over us and a bilingual upper hand. You might revert to being the obvious pathetic, insisting you don't understand at that given time in order to put off the public examination for later or to drop the class completely (Flee). You might have studied the leader's strategy, weak points, and favorite prey so that when singled out you know some counter measures or how to divert their attention (Camouflage). It is sometimes even possible to find yourself comparable to the enemy in that, while out of earshot, either alone in your den or in the common den of your brethren, it was devised that they would hold as little power over you as you would let them, and maybe one day you would even replace your adversary's powerful grip over their hour-long-tri-weekly-reign (Fight). Those latter cases can't help but beat their chest in front of peers and bring into question the Alpha's true knowledge of the subject by loudly correcting mistakes or by enabling self empowerment in the lesser humans in the form of a whispered answer, tutoring in order to raise the survival rate of your own kind and to create more fighters who will do the same, or generating a mutiny mentality that would overwhelm the leader into bending towards the will of the masses if demands were reasonable enough.
The prize of early registration pretty much throws all this out the window |
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