It has been two years and two months since I left my hometown. And it is not easy to go to an unknown place just for the hope of getting a better life. Especially when the culture is much different and the people are more heterogeneous than before. I must admit that this city is harsh, harsher than the previous big city I live in. Or maybe, I just don’t know that all big cities are the same?
The thing is the ethnocentrism that exists invisibly in the job field as well as in the daily life. It’s hard to be written out like this but it’s realized by people who live here. For me, I am innocent, until the society and family, even myself force me to have the same opinion for some reasons.
Maybe it is because I don’t have many friends here so I think that everyone is the same. Or maybe it is because the prejudice of the people who don’t really have any tolerance at all. And from that people, that prejudice passes on and on to the other people. Hmm, I don’t know.
Actually difference exists because God wants people to know and get along with each other, I assume. However people, and sometimes me too, often see difference as something that splits the society and form it into some specific groups of the same identity.
Yes people normally seek friends who have the same vision, the same opinion, the same interest, or the same ethnic group or even the same religion. But do people have to have the same prejudice as other people in their group? Don’t they have some self judgment?
What I need to do now is just neutralize myself, not letting those prejudices get into myself deeper and deeper. Or else, I will be narrow minded and very skeptic of living in a heterogeneous city.
Btm, 25 May 2015
catatanku 