The spirit of diversity

On this special day, I want to talk about what I like most about American culture, the spirit of diversity!

In the U.S., being progressive is not about wearing the trendiest clothes or using the newest gadgets. It is also not about being liberal or conservative. To be a progressive person, all you need to do is embracing the thoughts and beliefs that you do not agree with.

The U.S. is an immigrant society, so the people from different countries have brought their own culture and tradition with them. It is inevitable for the people here to have conflicts for different values and different ways of living in their daily life. However, they have learned to respect each other and accept the different customs through confrontations. Gradually, they have also learned to appreciate the merits of the different cultures. They found that embracing the difference ways if thinking of the others could actually create the most brilliant ideas that they would never think about just by themselves! It is those insights that make American the strongest country on earth!

During the presidential campaign of 2004, the presidential candidate for Democratic Party, John Kerry said that although he did not support the gay marriage because of his religion, he asserted that gays should have the right to marry each other legally, because it is the basic human right for everyone to decide how he or she wants to live. I truly praise his point of view, because he was able to embrace the beliefs that he did not agree with. This is a wonderful example for the spirit of diversity!

We all know there are many big corporations in the U.S., but even with tremendous money and power, they still cannot create a unanimous public opinion. We all know the U.S. have some of the largest national parks in the world. The plans to set up these parks were strongly opposed by the special interests earning a lot of profit from the lands, but they could not do anything to stop it, because the spirit of diversity just cannot be bought or thwarted by any mean!

Diversity is also an important aspect of education in the U.S. When you apply for college, you are asked for how you can contribute to the diversity of the school. Indeed, the spirit of diversity is far more important than technical skills, because no matter how much technology we have learned, if we are unable to embrace anything different from our beliefs, we would waste all the time and energy to fight one other instead of working together to make our country great.

To fulfill the spirit of diversity, we must overcome our bad habit of stereotyping. When we are treated badly by someone in the group A, we tend to blame the entire group A, but this kind of oversimplification does not make any sense, because everyone in the group has his or her own unique personality. Two people from the same group can have completely different beliefs and values. In fact, people can be in multiple groups at the same time. If there are 10 groups for ethnicity and 10 groups for religions, it would be 100 combinations! The large amount of variation makes our life so wonderful, like living in a beautiful garden with all kinds of plants and flowers! It is what makes the American society always vibrant and abundant! When we find how awesome it is for everything to be uniquely different, we will forget about stereotyping and embrace the spirit of diversity by heart!