PREJUDICE, HYPOCRISY

They’re funny things, prejudices. We all have them – to an extent, we need them. It can come as a surprise, however, when somebody has one against you.

            I was on my balcony smoking a cigarette when a car full of South-East Asian Muslims drove by. One of them happened to look a lot like Amrosi, the Bali bomb-plotter. “Fancy being brave enough to drive around looking like Amrosi,” I found myself thinking. “That takes some guts.”

            It wasn’t a malicious thought. It was barely a thought at all. But it stopped me. It got me thinking about friends and family who visit from the country and talk about “playing spot the Aussie”. To my memory, no Aboriginal person has ever made the same remark to me. No need, I hope, to elaborate that point.

            To visiting Caucasians the Asian population of Sydney’s Inner-West are all “chinks”; “slopes”; “fuckin’ gooks”. Those same “Aussies” might spend a moment to reflect that, to a certain generation of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian immigrants, they look just like the people who killed their brothers, raped their sisters and daughters, and burned or bombed their villages – and that it’s for those reasons that they fled their countries to build a new life here.

            The twin sister of prejudice is hypocrisy. Spending a couple of decades in Kings Cross, up to my eyeballs in the drug and sex industries, was a real education in that regard. Nobody does prejudice or hypocrisy like junkies and hookers.

            You have to see it to believe it. It’s really very funny. The dealers look down on the junkies and hookers who provide their living. Most of the hookers and junkies hate their dealers. The sex-workers look down on the junkies. The junkies look down on the sex-workers. Everyone looks down on the ice-freaks.

            And the sex industry’s even better. It’s almost like a caste system, where everybody despises the rungs beneath. The massage-parlour girls think they’re better than the hookers. The brothel workers think they’re better than the street-walkers; the high-class escorts better than both. The strippers think they’re better than all of them. Burlesque performers place themselves above the whole seedy business. And rent-boys? Forget about it – everyone looks down on rent-boys.

            We all need to feel better than somebody – especially if we’re fuck-ups. It’s a comforting thought, as you cry yourself to sleep, that somebody, somewhere, has screwed their life up worse than you have.

            Prejudice is an evolutionary throwback. Our distant forebears, in order to survive, needed to know that certain people, places and things were just bad. Belief is the same. If we had to spend time evaluating every single thought that comes into our heads or every situation or idea we encounter, we’d be simply unable to function.

            So, they’re helpful. That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t examine them occasionally and re-evaluate them. We all need to take time now and then to look at what we believe and throw out unreasonable prejudices.

            That’s how we avoid becoming assholes.