An article I read on newsflavor,( Children accused of witchcraft are being hunted and tortured in Africa. by craigz), got me to thinking. Something good reads have a  way of doing. What I was thinking about, had to do with the responses craigz had in his comment section. One comment in particular about “backward societies”, struck a cord in me. I just had to put my two cents in.

As in the Salem witch trails, the Holocaust, and the Spanish Inquisition, Labels have been used to eradicate groups of people thought undesirable. It has been stated in craigz’s article that street children are one of the groups targeted. This has been an issue in the South American countries of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, for Quite some time. In these countries street children ( homeless runaways and orphans that band together into gangs for protection, usually between the ages of eight and eighteen), are considered akin to vermin. There are even individuals paid to exterminate them. while this is reprehensible, the attitude’s of a populace that would allow such behavior are even more disturbing.

Before we “Label” another society as backwards, we need to stop and think about what is happening in our own backyard. This type of barbarity is going on in our own country every day. We just don’t wait for our unwanted children to be born, to eliminate them. Before anyone thinks about “Labeling me”, let me say that I am not a religious fundamentalist, and I am quite aware of the debate on when life begins. I’m just putting it out there for you to think about.

The attitudes that allow these atrocities to occur are prevalent in our own country, within ourselves. The outward acts are symptoms of the inner belief that some human beings have more worth than others. Don’t be hasty in your judgement of others. The only thing that separates us, is the prejudicial nature of ego based perception. The solution does not reside in the thought processes that caused the problem. It is to be found in the place were perception is free to evolve. When we give in to labeling others, for whatever reason. We dilute our higher energies of empathy, and love, with hypocrisy.