Alice and Diversity

We have trouble accepting what we don’t know. For me, I had trouble accepting the concept of ahimsa. I enjoy my life and its occasional conflicts and for me to fathom a life without these ordinary trials was difficult. However, my friend reminded me that if that was the norm, would I be more accepting of the idea? The more I think about it, the more I think that I would embrace this idea. We love what we know and what is familiar to us. I suppose that’s what makes diversity something that people strive for when forming communities—whether it’s a club, college, certain learning program, or area of town. Diversity means different people. But when I say different, I do not mean different backgrounds or ethnicities (although this can be one way of exemplifying diversity). I find myself thinking about the people themselves. Different ideas and mind-sets. Having a variety of thought processes and desires is what diversity means to me. So when diversity becomes the norm, it will be much easier for us to deal with.

But diversity, for us, is much easier to deal with than for Alice. Alice says, “’the face is what one goes by, generally’” (219), but she definitely cannot do this in Wonderland. However, Alice must deal with much more than differing viewpoints. She must deal with the fact that she must accept what she originally believed to be impossible: that is, animals talking to her and telling her things that are hard to understand. As if it isn’t too much to cope with that the animals are talking, much of what they say comes to her as nonsense. But what becomes the norm, becomes what we accept and even strive for. As the Unicorn says “’if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you” (229).

I can relate to having to be sensitive to the feelings of others, especially when I haven’t been around certain types of people much. For example, at my high school, I basically hung out with the same people all the time and I’ll admit we were all pretty liberal and pretty snobby toward conservative ideas. Thus, slights and insults come out pretty naturally against those types of ideas. And now that I’m here, I hang out with so many different groups and have to be much more sensitive and considerate of other people’s ideas. I have to remember that it can be offensive to people in the group to say nasty things so easily.

This is much like Alice’s experience with the dormouse. She has never had to deal with the feelings of a dormouse, so she says things that would not normally offend people, but that have “really offended it” (27). She keeps going on about how wonderful dogs and cats are, but to a dormouse those are just potential predators. I can relate this to how I might talk about how annoying and horrible I find Sarah Palin around a person who truly admires her. While this has been difficult, it has certainly been a good experience. I enjoy learning hearing different opinions and strive to fight against what Humpty Dumpty says to Alice: that “you’re so exactly like other people” (219).