Who do you think you are?

We had to deal with an incident recently... the notion of stereotypes and how they really don't provide a rich picture of who you are.Someone's friend was wondering about us and the motorcycles. "Do they have tattoos? I didn't think they hung out with those type of people."WTF?No, we don't have tattoos. No, we don't go around in gangs. No, we're not smuggling drugs. Just because someone is too shallow to even try to look at me and En to see who we are. Yes we have motorcycles, but we're not who you think we are.If you can't be bothered to figure is out isn't my worry -- it's the observer's fault. The fact they limit who they associate with only makes them poorer as humans because they don't permit themselves to have the freedom to think freely.The underlying sentiment is really: "They aren't behaving like I think they should. Who do they think they are anyway?"The way of making everything black and white, then bucketing people by how they need to get sorted. Once you have them in a bucket then you can't ever take them out since then you'd be wrong.A different friend of a friend moved up here from West Virginia. She was the first in her family to get a real education and make something of herself. When she goes back home she gets shunned by a bunch of people: "she think's she's better than us."No.You see this happening right now on a much larger scale too. Some terrorists are Muslims, therefore all Muslims are terrorists. The logic is watertight, right? But the oversimplification of the problem gets the wrong people in the wrong buckets. And once you've said it, you can't go back since that would be waffling and showing that you can be wrong.How do you fix it? I don't know. I wish I did.All I can say if you limit yourself to people just like you, you cut yourself off from the rich tapestry of this world; you'll live in a very monochromatic world. Black and white that you created all by yourself.