Treat others as you would want to be treated”my mom used this phrase constantly growing up, so much that it became engrained in me, part of who i am. And a few days ago I witnessed something that made this quote ring even more true to me than before. I was at the park with 5 of the clients from the shelter. We had been there for only a few minutes when one of the clients, a loud, outspoken, lesbian African American girl, began loudly making fun of a boy who was acting a little different on the playground. This boy was about 9 years old, I would say, and seemed to be minding his own business while talking to himself. This girl began to be so rude, I could barely stand to hear what she was saying and I became embarrassed that I was associated with someone who had so little tact that they would call out someone who obviously, to me, had some form of a disability. She toned it down once the staff there scolded her, but she still continued to act in such a way toward him that I thought was so extremely rude. As we were leaving the park I began to think about how we all see each other. This girl obviously saw this little boy as something different and so for whatever reason she decided it was okay to mock him.

This seemed so strange to me because I thought her of all people, someone who from what I had gathered had been kind of out casted her whole life, would be sensitive to such a thing as mocking those who were different. All of this came together and I realized that most people who are different in one way or another don’t see themselves as anything similar to those who maybe different in a separate way. I wondered how she would take it if someone had outwardly made fun of her for being lesbian or even for being homeless. And maybe she had been taunted for that and that is why she does it to others, but this idea of treating others as we would like to be treated struck me in the that why do we put others down in order to bring ourselves up. We all want to be treated with respect so why can’t we do so to others?In our society we take comfort in knowing that there is always someone below us. We as humans never want to be the bottom of the “chain.” So to make sure that doesn’t happen we pick on those who we view as “below” us to boost ourselves up above.

But these ideas got me thinking that whole idea of a hierarchy within our society maybe the reason why we have and had such a prominent homeless population. They are the lowest of the low in our society, and as screwed up as it is, people feel comforted in the fact that there is someone who is worse off than they are. So maybe there is a psychological resistance to the banishing of poverty. Maybe society feels uncomfortable with the idea of leveling the field, and having little or maybe even no homeless population might make all of us on the same “level.” Who knows. But the one thing I can tell you is that if we treat each other with respect, there would be a lot less conflict in our society.