Stupidity

Remembering an incident in class, I said a sentence that sounds somewhat like this, “No wonder this writing got marginalized, the writer writes about stones, hills, trees, birds and other animals that talk. I don’t mind if they speak about interesting things, but what they talk about is simply stupid. The whole story is stupid.”

When I think back about what I said, I think I should not have said that. Different people have different opinions and different opinions set different interpretation for stupidity. Maybe for me it’s stupid, but for the writer and the people whom he wrote it for, it maybe a very sacred story. Or maybe it’s a very humorous story, in their point of view.

And that’s the problem for most of us nowadays. We don’t respect others, their opinions, and their cultures. What we think about is mainly ourselves. If we look at some people with some strange clothes or accessories or way of life, we quickly come to conclusions such as these people are “uncivilized”, “weirdos”, “orthodox”, or “strange” without knowing that those things maybe normal for them.

For most of us, the “strange” things that we see in other cultures are weird, simply because we are not used to it. That’s why we often say what I said in class that day. “Stupid” things are not stupid just because we say they’re stupid. Sometimes, those things are not even close to stupid.

Without knowledge, we simply say that something is stupid. The question is, are we that good?


HambaMalam