Like Putty In My Hands!

I went out and bought some clay last night from Michaels. It’s green clay. I wasn’t really sure what to make it into, so I just played with it to get some inspiration. I ended up making it into a little blob-man with big eyebrows. I set him out on the porch, and went to bed. This morning, I got up, and realized that I really didn’t like his eyebrows. They need to be much smaller. Oh, and I think I’m going to give him some sort of hat. But when I went out to the porch to pick him up, I found that he’d become rock solid. Oh well, no hat for Mr. Blobman.

You are a lump of clay. I don’t mean that you’re unshapely; I mean that your mind acts like clay. Stick with me, and I’ll explain my metaphor.

When you are really young, you are very impressionable. As a kid, hopefully, you had a fair bit of interaction with the outside world, and the way you think today is shaped by your interactions when you were much younger. Now, that’s not to say that you’re totally rock solid (in your mind, once again, I’m not describing your physique), but you are probably a bit less impressionable than you were when you were five.

The question that I’m trying to answer here is... what? Oh, yeah, it’s about the socialization process, and whether or not I agree with it. Well, what I just described to you above is part of the socialization process. The process is when the society you live in—say, Carmel¬—instills in you certain beliefs—say, houses or buildings made out of brick mean that the inhabitants are higher class than people who live or work in wood or metal buildings.

This process is a big factor in our prejudices against certain people or groups. I was raised in California, so I probably have more of a prejudice against Mexicans than someone who was raised in Indiana, who probably has more of a prejudice against African-Americans. I remember quite distinctly certain events of discrimination from my childhood, such as the teacher kicking the Chinese girl out of the class more often, much better than I remember something that happened a year or so ago.

That raises the question that I’ll leave you with as I go to eat a waffle: When you have kids, or nieces or nephews, and they’re still in their goey clay form, what are you going to shape them into?

Waffle Time!