Lifeboat Prejudice

All people are different. Sometimes, if a person doesn't look or act in a way that is familiar to us, we can make assumptions about that person even though we don't know who they are, or their full story. Many people wouldn’t ever admit that they can be prejudice. Even if you are the nicest, most non-judgemental person in the world, you are most likely going to judge people at times. It’s hard to admit, but I sometimes find myself judging people a lot by what is on the surface. It is human nature to pre-judge but I try my hardest not to.
Recently, I was at an event where we played a game called Lifeboat. Lifeboat is a game where you pretend that you and twelve other people are on a desert island. There is one lifeboat but the boat can
only hold nine people.
That would mean that four people would have to stay on the island. You receive a slip of paper with a general characteristic, gender, and age. For example one profile might be, “Criminal,male,age 32”. Another might be, “Doctor,female,age 45”. The slip of paper was only for your eyes to see, and it would have about a paragraph saying everything that you can say outloud. At the bottom of the paper, there would be the parts of your story that you can't say. Everybody would share the parts of their story that they are able to say. After everyone has read their story out loud, we would have to decide who gets to go on the boat and who would have to stay on the desert island. Once you have decided who gets to go on the boat, you rank those people one through nine. One being “most important” and nine being “least important”. Once you decide you ranking order, everyone shares their full stories. Most of the characters that people didn’t want on the boat had a twist to their story. The criminal was put in jail for a crime of passion, but was once an extremely experienced boat captain, so he would be an asset to have on the boat. I also mentioned the female doctor. She is a doctor so you would generally think that she would have skills that would be helpful
on the boat. In reality, when you hear the rest of her story, you learn that she had a serious drug addiction . She had been sneaking prescription medicines. Her addiction has caused her to forget even the most simple medical procedures. This game helped me realize that you really have to learn more about a person before making general assumptions. After hearing the rest of people’s stories, I really wanted to change the order that I put the characters in. The few sentences that each person read about their characters was not enough to make an informed decision. I, along with others, found ourselves making unintentional snap judgements about these characters.
We can all find ourselves pre-judging people based on their race, religion, looks, job, sexual orientation, abilities, gender, amount of money, and many other characteristics that are on the surface. Today I feel like people pre-judge a lot. At school, people hang out and sit with people at lunch according to pre-judgements. You might not hang out with someone at your school, or in your community because of what they look like or the people they hang out with. Overall, we are all the same in one way. We all are human. We all were put on earth for a reason and we should be kind to each other. Remember to treat people fairly, and most importantly, listen to each other's full stories.