No one would believe that this could've happened to them. Tripping over a bright orange flip-flop at a party including our closest peers? This social audition that we use, unconsciously or not, as a networking platform for a better life rules our mindset. Whether it relates to our profession or just our instinctive will to be impressive and un-phased by our surroundings, we like to look like we are better, or at least as competent as others around us.
The point of the story is analogous to a bigger picture. One that tells something so much more important than an accidental, unfortunate tale of a friend that had an embarrassing moment while at a party among their peers.
One always thinks that he/she has an idea of what it means to be someone else. Recently, in California, a law was passed to allow transgendered human beings to choose which sport (male/female) that they would like to participate in as well as which restroom to use based upon which gender they feel that they belong to. Somehow, this law is, in some American's eyes, "ridiculous," and has caused a "shake my head" reaction.
Pinpointing back to the 1960s, in which I, fortunately enough, was not an African-American living at the time, the song remains the same in most respects today. Sadly though, the general public that is against the "transgression" of being transgendered, bi-sexual, homosexual, or just down-right unsure of their place in this world, has taken over the fore-front voice in our State.
Oddly enough, some of these people have children that were born with birth-defects that have permanently imprinted their lives with something that they cannot shed (at least for now, they're not within the scope or reach of medical science) yet they do not mind condemning those that were born with a slightly different "social or physical condition." They somehow do not see that we are comparing apples to apples in this discussion, not apples to oranges.
The 1960s ring heavily and with an ironic tone that carries the reminder that we cannot judge simply based upon what we do not understand. We cannot adjudicate based upon skin color, superficial characteristics, or pre-conditioned biases that have been programmed within from our ignorant ancestors' misguided principles about what they believed to be "truth" while they did not even know what a gene was. As oblivious as they were to the truth of biology and ecology as they were, they absolutely do not get a pass for their behavior that was completely based upon prejudice, chauvinism, and bigotry as they treated those unlike themselves as anything but what their Christ had condoned.
Now, to the point: The Native American saying of "walking in another person's moccasins" rings throughout. Ubiquitous to the madness. It's transcendent in its' expression, explicit in its' meaning. To judge a person negatively simply because they were born with a phenotypical trait is to fundamentally err in basic logic. When you have no ability to choose what "form" or "shape" you were born, irregardless of the political correctness behind it, means that we have absolutely no basis to stand upon when making statements or judgments denying which bathroom or which sport one can choose to participate in.
Until you, my friend, have been born "differently," and have any inkling of an idea of what it means to be "abnormal" in this society that we live in, I think it would be wise to withhold your typical Biblically-based assumptions and rhetoric regarding your beliefs about a human being's righteousness and ultimately what bathroom or sport you think someone should have the right to choose to be in.
