It seems like just when you think that you've gotten pretty good at recognising the assumptions you commonly make, another one jumps out at you.
With only half realising it, I had been making assumptions about bus drivers. Now this may seem really petty, but it ended up being something that totally shocked me yesterday. I realised that as a precaution, I had stereotyped them all as being the sort of middle-aged, white males that were probably conservative. I now know that this was so that I wouldn't end up "slipping" and saying something that would create this whole political atmosphere that would impede our comfortable relationship. Yesterday I got to find out how ridicule this assumption was...
My driver yesterday was telling us about how he'd always wait for us, that he didn't like it when drivers took off even though you could see the person just out of reach of the bus. It sounded like part of it came from his wife being in front of the bus when some driver started off. Our driver said that he figured that it was partly because she was black, and that he never found out who it was because he knew that fighting the other driver wouldn't do any good. This all lead into him telling us about how fe believed Gandhi saying that fighting doesn't solve anything, that all these wars haven't fixed things, that he's been trying help his son not be a fighter, and how he served a little in Vietnam.
It's amazing what the truth is sometimes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment