I turned to my step-dad and whispered, "oh GOD. I hate when people do this." "Do what?" he asked. Do what? Over-complicate things like this! This girl knew what the word "like" meant, she was just being a pretentious snobby dissection-obsessed pest, or so I thought at the time. Of course I believe in digging and dissecting, but aren't some things better left alone?
In Reading Place, when we started discussing what it meant to be human, I found myself feeling the same type of frustration with some of my classmates' comments. Why must we question whether a robot is more human than an ACTUAL HUMAN?! It angered me that some people were entirely convinced that a gorilla or even a machine was more human than a legitimate human being just because it's feelings and actions appeared more similar to that of the typical human. I thought to myself, who are these people to be stripping the wild child of what she was born as, and has the right to call herself? It wasn't her fault that she was deprived of everything that nourishes our potential to act human! How could my classmates suggest that just because a monkey is better at communicating, it is more of a human? I still do not know.
I find labels constricting and upsetting at times. I'm not one of those wacko-s who goes nuts over something like the senior poll, but when it comes to defining something serious and who gets to decide who qualifies as what, I find myself easily upset and misunderstood. It is hard to take a word and define it in a way that can be a sort of qualifying test for anything or anyone trying to count as that word, so my question is, why do we have to? In our most basic understanding, we know what a human is! After that, isn't this one of those things that's better left alone?
