And, think of the resources squandered in marginalizing the "other." Think what we could accomplish if we stopped expending our financial and emotional and real resources on controlling those whose marginalization we've institutionalized. Why can't we look at countries that function through oppression and see that in every single case, they are whole eras behind us in business, technology, societal evolution, and more. Why can't people see how this crap is actually dragging us backward, heading us into a retrograde society? We're going to end like Russia or Iran at this rate – and sooner than anyone might imagine.

As to your question at the start of this piece, I would definitely have to say I am nicer and less bigoted than as a child. Until I was a teenager, I pretty much parroted my parents' dogma. I started questioning around ten or eleven years old. It accelerated dramatically when our SBC church split over the pastor putting a Black family forward for membership in the congregation. I was twelve at the time. I just couldn't wrap my head around people being opposed, especially since the father was a Naval non-com, like my father. I remember feeling genuinely bereft when I finally understood it was because they were Black.

That pastor was driven away from the SBC entirely. Even my parents drifted away from the SBC after that. Though all their future churches were more diverse than that old baptist church, sadly, they drifted more and more fundamentalist and more and more extreme conservative. The arch of my cultural and spiritual journey was the opposite – I landed diametrically opposed to where they landed.