(8) No one mourns the wicked (8)

So every time I hear that song I think about some things. It makes me feel bad that no one cares about bad people. I mean it’s true, if someone does something bad, we feel good when we see them locked behind bars for the rest of their life. We feel good knowing that they won’t have the opportunity to hurt anyone else, including ourselves. It makes us feel good to feel safe. On the opposite end of things, when we hear that someone has done something terrible and is still roaming our streets, we get a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs. A feeling that lets us know that something is not right and something is not safe. As a basic human nature we like things to feel safe. We don’t like things to change and we definitely don’t like things that are different from the ordinary.

From what I understand about this song, since I haven’t seen the play, the witch is born green. Now we can all imagine what it would be like to see someone that is green walking down the street. We would be scared. It would probably make us feel uncomfortable because we wouldn’t know how to react to the situation. We probably wouldn’t know what to do with our eyes or if we should smile or not. We would be confused about how this could happen to someone. And most likely we wouldn’t talk to them. We would keep walking, pretending that we had never seen them.

So I’ve related this to real life. When we see something different we are afraid of it because we don’t know how to react to it. We don’t know what to expect and it scares us. There are so many different people all around us and it is hard for most people to look past those differences and find similarities. As a whole, especially as Americans, we are a very closed minded people. When we see someone, we immediately find flaws. We have been trained to look someone over to see if they/we measure up and we’re constantly comparing ourselves to other people. We look to see if our hair is as pretty as theirs or if our clothes are cuter than theirs. We have been trained to find things about ourselves that make us superior or inferior to those around us and it makes us feel better to know that there is at least one thing about ourselves that is, in our eyes, adequate.

The American population has been sucked into this hole where we have certain things that make us beautiful. Young women are especially drawn into this hole because we see all the different magazines and pictures of these perfect people and we will never be able to look like them.

Story #1
So on Wednesday at our activity we had Cherie Call come (she’s an LDS singer for those of you that don’t know who she is.) One of the first things that she talked about was her picture on her poster. She said that she laughs every time she sees it because people always tell her she looks so much different in real life. So she explained that the only reason her poster pictures looked so good was because she had people following her around all day making sure she looked perfect during her photo shoot and then after the photo shoot, they found two or three pictures that they could actually use and they made them even better over the computer. So she laughed and told us that there was no need to try and look as good as the women in magazines and things because they didn’t even look that way.

We all feel inferior to someone at one time or another. Often times someone will say something that makes us feel bad, but we think to ourselves, "if they took the time to say it, it must be true." And so we allow ourselves to believe that everyone else's opinion matters more than our own.

Story #2
Today in Young Women's, our teacher used the famous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." I really like that quote because it's true. We let people determine how we will act, feel, think, etc. all the time and it's time that we stood up for ourselves and decided for ourselves that we are adequate enough to be here. We are all important no matter how strange we are.

So moral of the story is that we should all try to be proud of who we are. There is no need for us to focus on our flaws or anyone else’s. We really need to try to find the good in people, even when there might seem to be no good to be found. Everyone has to have something good inside them, even the wicked.