Why do people insist on judging by looks?

I try my best to get out of this habit. The way people have of thinking I’m an immature teenager and will cause them nothing but trouble. Or the way people who don’t know how intelligent the three year old I babysit immediately adopting a cutesy, cooing voice as soon as they see him. Especially the way people treat “mentally disabled” people (I’m fairly sure that’s the “politically correct” term as it stands this year) - as though they couldn’t possibly think to do anything without being told twenty times over, and treating them like little kids. There are many others, these are just the three in my life that come to mind immediately, but there are many more, of course.

I have had e-mail conversations with potential employers who said I practically had the job once we got past the formalities, and then realised that I was too young for the job - having never told me the age I had to be because I had assumed they were looking at my resume and they had assumed I was at least 18 from talking to me. I have had bus drivers who can’t be bothered to deal with the steriotypical teenager that I am not decide to drive right on by, leaving me with another long wait.

The little boy I mentioned earlier loves to take advantage of people who treat him like a cute little clueless kid. He is, however, the smartest kid his age I’ve ever met. He can tell you more facts about dinosaurs and sea creatures - including the scientific names - than I could tell you after an hour of research. He uses “big words”, not just to show off like many kids seem to do - he knows the meaning of every word that comes out of his mouth. I have actually tested this in the past, trying to win a dispute with him and hearing a word that I hadn’t known until I was around 10.

It’s experiences like these that have led me to adopt my habits in the way I treat people. Put simply - everyone is the same in my books until I’m given a reason to treat them otherwise. I don’t care if you’re old or young, disabled or not, have white, black or green skin - I just don’t care. So, everyone’s in the same boat - we all have to deal with eachother, equality is my answer.

When do I start treating people differently? Lets say you and I are doing a project together - I don’t care if you’re five or fifty, I will treat you as my equal. If you start talking like a kid, or talking to me as though I were a kid, I will more than likely ignore you and start doing your part of the work as well as my own - which I’ll admit isn’t quite right, but it’s my automatic reaction. If you start giving me compliments out of the blue, I will get paranoid - because people do that when they want something from me. Those are just the easiest to explain, once again, there are others.

When I mentioned the mentally disabled earlier, it was one girl in particular I was thinking of, a volunteer at camp who had Downs syndrome. She was really alot like me. We were both extremely quiet until something caught our attention, and then we’d start talking excitedly - and we both did our best to treat people equally. What she most often got annoyed about was that people always acted like they were above her - all she wanted was to be able to work and to be treated equally. So we’d go off together away from the person who was supposed to be watching her (who frequently got mad at my friend for not listening, though I think it was her “helper” who wasn’t listening) and go do simple things that needed to be done - get the mail, make juice, organize activities for the kids. She needed help walking sometimes because she had a weak leg, and there were a few things she would just get frustrated over trying to do - but she was always insanely happy to be trusted with any sort of job, and was surprised to be treated as an equal, as though she had thought it was impossible for anyone “normal” to just be her friend.

So, my advice to you, take it or leave it, is treat people equally - at least until they give you a reason not to.

~Lauren, Lauren.Rizzotto@theguthan.com