I was born in 1966 and consider myself a child of the 1970s. At any rate, this is the time when most of my formation seems to have taken place. There have been refininements since then, but how I came to percieve the world was formed during that time.

It was a turbulant time (perhaps not as turbulant as the 1960s, but I have almost no memory of them). It was a time when racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimmination existed. Where prejudiced ideas and notions about people, their capabilities ruled.

I couldn't understand it. the colour of a person's skin, or the ancestral race of a person, the gender of a person, the language spoken, none of these made a person better or worse.

I believed that people held such foolish ideas out of ignorance (either that or it was out of idiocy).

I came to the conclusion that such ideas were the result of ignorance and, happily this would soon be extinct thanks to education.

My line of reasoning was something as follows:

For most of human history, people have led meagre lives of subsitence, struggling to survice from one year to the next.

Knowledge and power was kept in the hands of a few who manipulated people according to their whims. And the masses, lacking education, had no way of knwoing any better. If your king said something, then who were you to question.

However, slowly, over time, this changed. People gained more power for themselves. Had more say in their day to day existence. While early forms of democracy existed, they were far from perfect, since knowledge, education was still available to the few, the elite.

After the second world war, I saw what I thought was a critical change in history - universal education. finally, people would be taught, would learn, would be freed from their ignorance.

The Vietnam War, the Cold War were all relics of a dying age, a bloody testament to the power of madness and ignorance. With education, people would come to see that this sort of behaviour, constant aggression were wrong.

I astounded when Ronald Reagan was elected. How could we (well, the Americans), in this age of knowledge, elect such an ancient dinosaur? Of course, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain wasn't any better, nor was Breznev, or Andorpov or Chernko in the USSR. Clearly these were the final acts of ignorance in its death throes.

Gorbachev seemed to signal the end of the era of ignorance. Of course, we still had that old dinosaur governing the US, but surely, he could see what was going on? Apparently not.

And were are we today? Are we any more enlightened? Are we any more adavanced? I wouldn't bet on it.

We still live in an age of ignorance. We still live in a world where prejudice and ignorance drive people.

Do you want proof? When they talk about president Obama in the United States, they don't talk about him as a president. They talk about him as a BLACK president.

He is not a man, he is not a person, he is a labelled person. He does not stand on his own, he is not his own, he is  label.

Until we see and treat people as human beings - without labels, without prejudice - we continue to be a people who walk in ignorance.

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Apologies for any spelling mistakes or any incoherence, since I am hurridly typing this before getting back to workign on the house. It is likely I will update this post in a few days time.