The Truth | Teen Ink

The Truth

August 17, 2011
By Jaclyn Ratcliffe BRONZE, Strasburg, Virginia
Jaclyn Ratcliffe BRONZE, Strasburg, Virginia
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

What’s the truth about Pride and Prejudice? Why do we become prideful of horrible attributes? Why do we feel prejudice over so many small, meaningless things? You really want the truth behind pride and prejudice? Perfection. Everyone wants- in some way, shape, or form- to be perfect. Skinny people can be prejudiced towards fat people because they aren’t ‘perfect’. Beautiful people are prideful of their exterior near-‘perfection’. The concept of perfection is something that causes us as imperfect beings to be violent towards one another. Doesn’t anyone get why all tries at utopia failed? They strove for perfection, but they themselves were imperfect. Say what I write out loud- I AM NOT PERFECT. I WILL NEVER BE PERFECT. Why does perfection drive us so crazy? Because we see it all wrong. Perfection is not truly existent. It is a state of mind referred to as “Seeing the glass half full.” Just as much as personality differs, so does perfection. Personally, my perfection is a nice long car ride with my mother in the middle of the night. My guess is yours is probably not the same. Everyone seems to think that what other people think of perfect and their thoughts should be the same… Are all girls Barbie and all boys Ken? We are a diverse race of perfectly imperfect living organisms. The sooner we realize that Homo sapien means the same thing in black, white, yellow, red, purple, gay, straight, bi, junkie, dealer, genius and idiot, the sooner all the war and killing and REALLY messed up stuff ends. We need to understand that we are imperfect, even in our own eyes, because there will always be a part of us that is mean and hateful. But we also need to understand that our greatest attribute is our control over our hate and anger and spite. I read a book once that made me ask myself, ‘who is the better man; the man without the anger, or the man who fights with himself everyday to control it?’ So there’s the truth. Bittersweet, isn’t it? You can see it as horrible and nasty, or you can look on the bright side and see that though life cannot be perfect, the imperfections make the good parts great. It makes a lemon of a life into lemonade. If one person stops and asks themselves, ‘Why do I hate them?” or “Why am I mean to them?” or even “Why am I doing this”, my job is done. Because they would have realized just how oddly they where contorting the truth in their own mind. They’ll realize that perfection is the greatest way form mankind to commit suicide. That is the truth, By Jackie.


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