The city was unlike anything else i had ever seen. Sure most cities are diverse, but San Francisco took it to a whole new level. Specifically we stuck to the Mission, Castro, Haight Ashbury, as well as a few other districts. You could bee walking down one street buying the cheapest yet best fruit you've ever had, surrounded by little mexican type shops, and cheap tacos, Then you literally cross the street and the prices are all 5 times higher, the neighborhood is fresh and clean cut and the advertisements that usually plastered with attractive females turn to shirtless men as people of the same gender walk hand in hand under the rainbow flags proudly hung on every street light.
It was hard for my to understand how such clean cut divisions could be made. They live right next to one another, but the world are so different. This coming from me who grew up in The Twin cities suburbs surrounded by all white people and zero diversity. Now here in Winona where everyone seems to melt together. Yet as I stop and look at Winona I see the same lines being drawn. Granted we don't have the space of a city to draw or lines, so we can not make as profound of differences as are made in San Francisco, But they are still there, even just on the campus.
You see one group of people colonizing tables to play World of Warcraft, while others meet to do improve comedy, poetic and earth friendly tree huggers previously colonized the coffee shop till the Christians took over, geologists are all in their wing of the labs locked behind their coded doors, nursing students are so much in their own world that there's no telling where they are, but their working on something, freshman roam the dorm lounges, the weird people are over at west campus, the international students in the upper hyphen, a subgroup of Christians in the solarium, the political people are off in the student senate office, and then there are the dozens if not more students locked in their room hidden away from the world. But if anyone ventures outside the area of their group they also will cut out the world. Putting in their headphones, burring themselves in homework, blankly looking through facebook just to pass the time, and because it takes to much effort to find anyone to talk to.
How do we get like this? How do we become so divided? I know it has to happen to a point. We are all given different talents, and different passions. But how does it get to the point where we would rather interact with an almost blank screen than have human contact? How is it that we leave so many people out of everything we do? Why do we feel a need to sit on our butts and are not compelled to talk to the other person alone sitting across the room? Have we become so cold that we simply do not care? Is it just so foreign to us that we don't see the value? Are we so selfish that we want to stay comfortable at the cost of others, and even ourselves?
It seemed that most everyone i talked to in San Francisco went there because in some way they were cut out, not cared for, or not content. Not content because they couldn't be themselves. Because people look funny and frown upon things that are different, because it makes us uncomfortable. They find the freedom to do these things in their city, just as we find freedom in our groups. yet there are still the people sitting alone. The strangers with the music going. People who are hurt, and in the midst of their new freedom decide to suppress the past hoping it will go away. People with issues above and beyond anything that you or I could possible imagine. And we become so content in our soft squishy groups that we walk on by. Most the time we become so comfortable in our groups that we decide we're ok, and as long as we have those people, and as long as we have that connection we're going to make it. It doesn't matter how we act or feel when we're away from them. Or the attitudes we have towards other groups if we even acknowledge their existence. It can get to the point where we love our comfort so much we never take time to question anything, so we sit down in our snuggled into our group meeting and drink out cyanide Kool-Aid.
Diversity is a blessing. Nature gives us so many different examples of how different groups of plants and animals interact. There is mutualism, where the two organisms benefit from their relationship. Commensalism, where one benefits and the other is seemingly unaffected. And then Parasitism, One gets hurt while the other benefits. When things interact they usually take one of these routes, this works the same for animals as it does for people. How do we interact, how do I interact?
