Mirror
A psychologist, Dr. Arthur Aron, once designed thirty-six questions that help to get to know a person well and experimented their efficacy with groups of couples who were strangers to each other. The questions were broken up into different sets to be asked within a quarter of an hour at the most. Most of the couples took longer with each set. At the end they looked into each others' eyes for around four minutes. Through those questions and through looking at each other, they gained confidence in each other, and one couple from the experiment even went on to get married.
Amnesty International took a portion of that experiment, and made a publicity campaign. They had a refugee and a European sit opposite each other and look at each other for four minutes. After that time, and most before, they were smiling at each other and trying to communicate. The objective was to show people that labels simply separate us and dehumanize those we label. That after looking at each other we realize we are all more alike than different.
But of course. If we talk about the millions displaced by wars and repressive governments and simply call them refugees or illegal immigrants or "those who come to steal our jobs," we separate ourselves from them by one or two degrees. They become numbers, statistics, threats. If we know each individual story, empathy comes into play and we see ourselves reflected in their eyes. How many who talk against immigrants excuse themselves by saying, "I get along very well with my immigrant neighbor who lives across from me, it's these lazy bums who come to live on welfare I don't like."? Yet, the immigrant neighbor might have had to receive a stipend of some sort from the government at one time or another. As well as the complainer.
When I was eight or nine I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. Through that and other books, I learned the history of the Holocaust. When I read history books with simple statistics and campaigns and descriptions of life and death in the camps, they were simply information. When I read the individual stories that had been collected, the tears would sometimes come to my eyes. Whenever I reread Anne's Diary, I would wonder what would have been of her if she hadn't died. She was about two weeks older than my mother. I found it surreal that both of them, by virtue of being born a thousand kilometers apart, on the same continent, had such different fates. By reading her personal story, Anne Frank was no longer a simple casualty of history for me.
Here is the video. Watch it. Realize that when you look at an immigrant or a refugee, you are looking in the mirror.
Amnesty International took a portion of that experiment, and made a publicity campaign. They had a refugee and a European sit opposite each other and look at each other for four minutes. After that time, and most before, they were smiling at each other and trying to communicate. The objective was to show people that labels simply separate us and dehumanize those we label. That after looking at each other we realize we are all more alike than different.
But of course. If we talk about the millions displaced by wars and repressive governments and simply call them refugees or illegal immigrants or "those who come to steal our jobs," we separate ourselves from them by one or two degrees. They become numbers, statistics, threats. If we know each individual story, empathy comes into play and we see ourselves reflected in their eyes. How many who talk against immigrants excuse themselves by saying, "I get along very well with my immigrant neighbor who lives across from me, it's these lazy bums who come to live on welfare I don't like."? Yet, the immigrant neighbor might have had to receive a stipend of some sort from the government at one time or another. As well as the complainer.
When I was eight or nine I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. Through that and other books, I learned the history of the Holocaust. When I read history books with simple statistics and campaigns and descriptions of life and death in the camps, they were simply information. When I read the individual stories that had been collected, the tears would sometimes come to my eyes. Whenever I reread Anne's Diary, I would wonder what would have been of her if she hadn't died. She was about two weeks older than my mother. I found it surreal that both of them, by virtue of being born a thousand kilometers apart, on the same continent, had such different fates. By reading her personal story, Anne Frank was no longer a simple casualty of history for me.
Here is the video. Watch it. Realize that when you look at an immigrant or a refugee, you are looking in the mirror.
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