The X-Men Situation

Halfway through watching X-Men First Class someone sat on the chair beside me and started using her hand sanitizer that smelled like strawberry grown in the arid soil of Dante's hell. With that, I am being kind. The putrid odor I suppose came from the essences of plants grown in Mordor, in the fires of Mt. Doom, tended by Orcs. That being said, I think we could all agree of the degree of aversion I had with that offensive smell, and by extension, that woman. If not for the awesome scenes I dared not miss, I would have stood up and grappled that woman out of the cinema, or at least where diffusion would not allow her scent to cause distress.

Then I thought this is exactly our general attitude towards something different, eccentric or shall we say, something which stands out. Our collective revulsion against something different from what we like, or what we are used to, manifests in our fear of the unknown, racial and gender discrimination, prejudice, and in the case of the X-Men, all of these.

Basic genetics tells us that we are all different from one another and sometimes our differences elicit varied reactions from people. We sometimes find ourselves among the mutants at the shore, bombarded with a shower of missiles that could instantly annihilate us and forever eradicate our uniqueness from the face of the earth. The good thing is, we can always be Magneto and it is up to us whether we stop the missiles in their tracks and make them drop dead without harming anything other than your feelings, or make them turn the other way around and destroy the very entities that caused injury in the first place.

If you were to have that power, what would you have done? What do you think is a better judgment, to believe that you could live in harmony with the others who might someday accept your differences, or strive to eradicate them in your life as they have sought to eradicate you from theirs? If they can't stand you, will you hope for that to change or do otherwise?

By the way, I still want to wrestle that woman beside me.


Photo from piccsy.com