Domoguen: Before you judge, stop and think about their good intentions

“WHATEVER you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in difficult times indeed; an age where the prevailing culture tests your resolve to move ahead in pursuit of your aspirations and dreams.

At home, in the workplace, and in the community, people readily pass a lot of strong judgments against other people. You need an equivalent will to carry on and not wilt in defeat in your corner.

In rural development work, we have since known how people with a little understanding of the complicated situation involving the environment, the weather, and what happened behind the scenes readily condemn a difficult project as a failure. You must be strong and thick skinned otherwise you give up and abandon what you are doing.

In the workplace, people take an instance of behavior -- like the way anybody in the ranks take offense when you passed them by without saying hi or hello, or failing any tiny interaction to form bad opinions or conclusions about you.

We are a civilized people but even in this Information Age, we find ourselves suspicious of people from other places and what motivates them.

If the martyrs of the ages would speak to us today seeing how we form snap negative judgments, they would in unison declare: “This is no way to live and treat others.”

In the Cordillera, we live and work among people from different places of origin and influences from outside. We come from different tribes, cultural backgrounds, speak different dialects, and have different orientations. We even have different religions and faiths these days enriching further our diversities as a people.

As development workers, we promote development projects that integrate people, places, and facilitate the conduct of commerce. We promote the construction of modern transportation and communication infrastructures and undertake other interventions to improve livelihoods and enhance the quality of human existence in our communities.

But through it all, we know something is amiss. We can perhaps recreate the Earth but not our negative view of others. On television, we see negative snap judgments behind the road rages in our highways. On both mainstream and social media, messages and opinions from a racist, hate, put down, bad, and evil platform bombard our silkscreens every moment of the day.

I sometimes imagine Aldous Huxley’s science fiction novel, “A brave new world,” was suggestion and solution to humanity’s misery arising from hatred, jealousy, strife and humanity’s negative views of itself.

Certainly, it is absurd, which is why, I suggest instead that you feel that urge to judge and decide against anybody, stop and think.

Unless you know the whole story, you do not know whether people acted wrongly, or that they are assholes.

When somebody cut you off in the highway, maybe he is in an emergency and is therefore in a legitimate hurry than you are on the road, so please give way.

When an office mate passes you by along the way without greeting or smiling at you, did you notice her or his difficulties seeing things from a distance these days, and other reasons? We really need to take a minute or two to think about what we don’t know in a situation before we judge and act.

“People only criticize people who they feel are above them.” -- Mark Manson.

“Whenever we condemn, we cloak the world in pain.” -- Hugh Prather.

For your sake, for anybody and everybody’s sake, when we don’t have all the facts about something, suspend judgment.

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