I am sitting here before my keyboard with my insides all heavy and congested. I don't understand how people can consider other people to be less than human. After watching this documentary, the only explanation I can think of for the way Afghan women are treated is that the men don't think women are human.
Of course this probably strikes me more profoundly because I'm a woman and because I know, pervasively, throughout history, women have been considered an inferior species.
It's not just women; anyone who's different can be conveniently labeled as inferior. It was okay to have black Africans as slaves in colonial America because, after all, they weren't really human. Never mind that white folks could cross breed with them and produce viable offspring. Anyone who's a different religion is suspect at the very least, more likely damned. Gays, no doubt about where they'll be cooking for all eternity. Don't yah know that their raison de'tre is to destroy the heterosexual family. And, hey, if people speak a different language, can't trust 'em, they're probably plotting in their heathen tongue against us.
I read a science fiction story when I was a kid that really left a mark on me. It compared an alien in human society to a green monkey, The story claimed that if you took a monkey from his troop, painted him green, then returned him to his troop, the other monkeys would kill him and tear him limb from limb because he was different. The author claimed that aliens would never be able to live among humans because they would provoke the same reaction from us. Different is bad and frightening and needs to be controlled or killed.
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be human. Especially when I don't feel like I'm doing anything to make it better.