ITE "Enrico Tosi"

WORDS THAT OPEN UP NEW WORLDS

Hi, my name is Alice and I would like to tell you a story that I wise man told me and I think it explains the importance of discussion.

Once upon a time, in a village there were six blind men. One day the villagers told them “Hey, there’s an elephant in the village”. They had no idea what an elephant was. Even though they couldn’t see it, they decided they could go ahead and feel it. All of them went where the elephant was and each one touched it. One man touched his leg said “Hey, the elephant is a pillar,”another man said “Oh, no! it is like a rope,” while touching the tail. “Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said another who touched the trunk of the elephant. “It is like a solid pipe,” said the last of the six man who touched the tusk of the elephant. They all began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right. A wise man who was passing by stopped and asked them, “What is the matter?” They said, “We cannot agree to what the elephant is like.” Each one of them told him what he thought the elephant was like. The wise man calmly explained to them, “All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched a different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features.” “Oh” everyone said and there was no more fight.

Each of us has a different perspective and point of you, so as humans we can either argue or discuss. Arguing leads to misunderstanding, conflict and war. Discussion leads to tolerance, learning, opening our minds and spiritual and intellectual growth. Both arguing and discussing are characteristics of human beings, it’s up to us to decide to which category we want to belong.

Unlike arguing, which means imposing our ideas onto others, discussion is respecting each other and going beyond individual differences. We are all human, so we have to work as a unit toward a common goal. And this goal is to better ourselves through listening to others. Think about it for a second…isn’t it what we are doing right now?

You know what happened to me?

This past summer I was in New York in a really international and multicultural context and I got the chance to talk to two young men from the Middle East and I asked them a question about an issue I am truly concerned about and I said “I don’t meant to be judgmental, but why is it that in some parts of Saudi Arabia you consider women inferior to men?” and they replied that, before living in the US, they didn’t even realize that in other parts of the world men and women have, more or less, the same opportunities. This struck me but it also made me think that we usually consider our own experience and habits as the only right ones, but experience and habits are different for people who live on the other side of the world, but without going so far differences are part of every single reality, even in our community. Acknowledging and becoming aware of differences can be accomplished only through exchange, and exchange means discussion. Understanding the importance of discussion is particularly difficult for young adults since some of the examples the world is offering us are not inspiring at all. Let’s think about Palestine, Syria, North Korea and political leaders in general, they come down to clashes because they are not able to claim their ideas without overwhelming all the others. So it is up to us to teach the world to become human and empathic thanks to diplomacy, peaceful confrontation, discussion and the power of words.