Pride & Prejudice... Or maybe, just Prejudice

I think one of the things that mostly get on my nerves is having a closed-minded approach to the world. It drives me insane that some people are so intolerant and so unappreciative of other cultures, people that think that everything should conform to their norms and their ideals.

There's a guy at the office who will be going to India soon on a business trip and as we were talking about it, I told him how insanely jealous I was and how my life's dream is to go India, take a year off and just backpack all across that amazing country. His reaction was not what I was expecting. He looked at me with utter shock, saying that there's nothing interesting about India, that it's a land filled with poverty and is not worth seeing. He made fun of me, was extremely sarcastic, making various racist comments. The problem is that his racist comments were not made out of malice, they were made out of pure ignorance. They were based on using one frame of reference, judging the world by his own eyes only and completely disregarding differences in culture. No, not disregarding it, being completely unaware that other frames of reference exist, that our differences are what make us special and that these differences must be accepted and understood in order to appreciate the beauty of the human race.

There are two kinds of closed-mindedness, one which comes out of ignorance, and another that comes from educated prejudice and I am not sure which one is worse. Ignorance, and not wanting to change it, is a death of the mind. Educated prejudice is a death of the soul.

Can the human race be saved? Will we ever be a world that sees humans as just that, humans?