Something to think about...

Is it okay to go through life expecting and anticipating that everything we have plan, everything that we work so hard for would just fall apart? Is it healthy to keep our expectations low and expect everyone to stab us in the back? Should we trust nobody and confide nothing to our friends, family members, or coworkers in fear that they will use this information to hurt us?

I ask these questions as I sit in a workshop dealing with appropriate sexual relationships. I wonder what happened in our society where we no longer have a sense of appropriate boundaries. Talking to two fellow students they said, if they were walking back alone at night to their dorm and was approached by unknown male, their immediate reaction is that this man will hurt them. Now I understand that we should be on guard but why is that our first reaction? You could apply this same question to seeing a black male walking down the street. Many of our reaction is that he is going to hurt us when 99% percent of the time the man is just walking to the store. Why are we always on the guard? Why do we feel that there is always someone out there that wants to hurt us?

I feel that our society, our cultural, is calling us to be on guard. Ever since 9/11, we fear that someone is going to attack us again. Which is probably true since we attack back. What if we just talked instead of fight? What if we had an open mind, while still being on guard, but not expecting everyone is out to get us. Open mindedness is key in the world right now. We are all not criminals. We are confused and scared.