The world is a beautiful place, but it is also cruel. At least, society is. It is afraid of the unknown and the different. This is human nature, but you would think that we would have learned enough to be more excepting by now. But then again, society rarely learns from its mistakes. People are afraid of anything different because it is unknown and outside of their comfort zones. They have been taught to only accept certain kinds of beauty and certain types of people. To look at this in an extreme way, someone could be highly intelligent, kind and gentle, but extremely deformed. This person would have no path in life, and would be feared and despised by many people because of the person's appearance. Why would this be? Simply because people with deformities are considered "scary", "evil", and "bad" in our society, (the media helps promote this). Even though we now understand why people are deformed, and know that it's not a mark of the devil and that it has nothing to do with who they are inside, the attitudes of many people are still the same as they were in the Middle Ages. 

This theme of persecution based on appearance is central to one of my favorite movies, Edward Scissorhands. Although Edward is as gentle, sweet and kind as a person can be, he is eventually hated and feared by his neighbors because of his frightening appearance. Even though most of us don't have scissors for hands, this is a sad reflection of real life. Doesn't it say something about the nature of our society that someone who is so pure of heart can be hated because he looks different? Many groups of people are discriminated against for similar reasons, such as goths, who are sometimes thought of as dangerous and depressed murderers because they dress in a dark fashion and are interested in death. Murder is a result of insanity; it has nothing to do with the way you dress. And no group of people are all the same, your personality is unique, no matter what your lifestyle. You don't need to dress eccentrically to be thought of as weird, however, those who act differently or have unusual interests are also interpreted as negative. As long as they aren't obnoxious, I think it is lovely to have a wide variety of people in your life, instead of friends who all act and dress exactly the same.

The way you should be judged in life is by who you are emotionally and by the way you interact with other people. However, this is rarely how people are judged. People from all walks of life discriminate, and this will probably never end. Not everyone will stop eating everything the media feeds them. I wish that others would look on being different not as a negative thing, but as a positive thing. If everyone would learn to accept alternative kinds of beauty, the world would be a better place.