I have wealthy friends, I have friends who are doing worse than me. Most of my friends are university graduates, some of them barely finished primary school. I don’t pay too much attention of their attractiveness but some of them ought to be more beautiful than others. Some of my friends speak with a clear, good accent while others have strong eastern accents. You might find the way they speak funny. But I don’t. I make friends with people who are streetwise and resourceful. You might call some other friends of mine “mother’s darling”. Of all these things I have mentioned above; none of them factor in how close a friend is to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I don’t care. But they are definitely not determining factors for my friendships. I don’t discriminate people based on their social status, education, appearance, etc.
My relationship doesn’t go very far with somebody who is not a man of his word. My close friends are punctual, reliable and they keep their promises. I don’t hang out with snobs, envious, scornful people. But the most important qualities I look for in a friend is being cultivated and refined and open minded. I am attracted to people who has a spark in their eyes. You know, the opposite of being a zombie. I make very strong distinctions on these matters. Everybody wants to have nice friends. I’m a nazi about it. I’d rather not waste any time on shallow people and their silly affairs.
We live in a society where any and all kinds of discrimination is frowned upon. I call this “but he is a good guy” disorder. That but clearly indicates there is something not good about that guy, he is not all-good. Scrape any negative attribute off of people. Are we all equally honest? Are we all self-sacrificing and understanding? And then that guy is actually a very nice person. Very nice my ass.
Discrimination based on gender or color or whatever superficial feature is bad. Even kindergarden children know that. Not discriminating at all is idiotic at best and bad for the society at worst. You have to make a choice between people, you can’t be intimate with everybody. You better not base your choice on stupid criteria like coolness or popularity or, god forbid, assertiveness. This is the exact same mistake we make choosing our rulers… ehm, I mean political representatives.
This is not just about human beings. We need to pick out the good from bad when we are making spending decisions. I have seen Food, Inc. recently and it talks about this (near the end). Corporations hide behind many layers of obscurity and we don’t easily see how they are doing their business. To compound that we, as individuals, think ourselves as too small to matter against big companies. But the truth is the only thing we can do happens to be a very powerful way to send them a message. If a company is evil, don’t buy its product. You can’t do much else anyway, but this one act should be enough.
So, make a choice. Or not. Choice is yours.
