Do you judge on first appearance?

I was walking past the local primary school the other day as the kids were whizzing around in the playground, getting ready for school holidays, looking the picture of happiness. What a great day that was when we were kids. Some bean bags and tennis balls had come over the fence and onto the public street. I bent down and through them back over, smiling at the kids who were saying thankyou, some making cheeky comments etc. Because I touched the fence near their hands the security guard gave me a really nasty look and immediately locked the gate. Man I felt like whacking him for such paranoid and antagonistic behavior. Clearly the school must have felt that the six million to one chance that a child could be abducted off the street was going to be in their school yard and so they needed Andy McNab guarding the hoola hoops. The day you can’t smile at kids without feeing like a pedophile is already here it seems. I certainly wasn’t dressed like a pedo (what ever that is) and so judged by purely being there and then. The fact the parents are nine times more likely to abuse them than a total stranger at any one time is neither here nor there it seems in this PC and paranoid world we live in.

As chaotic as the world seems there are systems in play that stops anarchy. Our brains and eyes are designed to keep those structures in place. The Police can only react to crime and disorder, not prevent it. It’s up to us to avoid situations and help others in them. But under the now departed New Labors nanny state we have definitely been cosseted too much and not letting our kids out of site an example of, meaning the above paranoia. This means we are judging people even more these days.

Apparently our genetic gene pool, made up of atoms from the beginning of time, is designed to make us paranoid and defensive on threats around us. This is how the human species survives on this baron rock. The brain is lazy and designed to make the obvious and easy option, hence us not liking exercise and getting up to change the TV channel when we cant find the remote to click off My Family. We quickly learn that it’s stupid to run in front of traffic as it is also dumb to ask Sean Penn for his autograph after a few pints. Therefore being judgmental is intrinsic in our paranoid psyche and so should be listened to. If you see a young guy under a baseball cap and wrapped in the polyester shell suit the chances of him being a mugger quickly shoots up in your head.

Scientist have recently introduced CCTV software that can calculate if we will have criminal tendencies or not by computer mapping of our walking gate. I think we have all seen the council house oiks and their penguin bo-legged walk, spitting to mark their perceived territory, presumably the ones the scientists are talking about. The gate (the natural gap between the legs) is a tell tale sign of a ‘wrong un’, apparently.

If you see a young kid in a shell suit then it’s fair to say it’s the chosen uniform of the underclass scavenger, the feral youth scurrying around the sink estates vandalizing, taking drugs and causing merry hell to residents. They wear shell suits to play up to that role, therefore should always be judged as what they want to be, and so avoided. You increase your chances of an easy life by doing just that. It’s the same for guys with gold teeth and chains in Tottenham.

One of the deepest pre programmed glitches in the human being is its mistrust of other ethnic minorities. It’s irrational that most caucasians are intimidated by Afro Caribbean men but that’s they way it seems to be. You would presume this goes back to slavery and the racial divide carved out between the slave traders of all colors. This is why some black guys tend to have chips on their shoulders over how white people see them. Unfortunately both sides reinforce and fore fill racial stereotypes because of this divide and so we suffer conflicts, the authority of the ‘thin blue line’ the ones that suffer it the most.

Its not only crime and race that has us being prejudice and judgmental, social class and the opposite sex also have us talking stereotypes. It’s always been fairly easy to tell the differences between the socials classes in the U.K. and that’s why pubs and suburbs, for example, are as territorial as they are. If the clientele are wearing nylon and polyester, lots of cheap and chunky jewelry on show, you know it’s NOT a redbrick student pub. If there are lots of designer cotton labels and a distinct lack of make up about on the lasses then you know it’s not a sink estate pub. In fact class distinction is nowhere more apparent than it is in Britain. If a girl is pregnant by 17 she aint posh, and therefore you can fill in the gaps with your opinion and stereotypes of her, as we all do. You won’t see Ben from Exeter University wearing a ‘Bench’ top! You also want see Kelly and Kylie listening to Radiohead. We resort to stereotypes to fit in and be liked. The Oasis/Blur battle was a classic example of that. If you picked Blur you were a middle-class plonker wanting to be working-class at college and if you picked Oasis you were just working-class. If you picked neither you were neither, the place no one wants to be at college if they want to be part of the all important social groupings that define the youth of today.

The mating game is where we are at our worse for judging people, English girls particularly selective these days. Like I said I’ve noticed the more intelligent a girl is the less the need she has to wear make-up, and so the sexier she is to me. The girls of lower social classes rely more on their ‘mating capacities’ to be noticed in life, caking on the slap, regularly seen in mid January on a Saturday night wearing next to nothing in the freezing cold. A man, not a career, is all they want for identity. They see marriage and boyfriends as the best way out of poverty where as educated women increasingly put careers before relationships and babies.

The amounts of hoops you have to jump through in class ridden Britain are many, as we all know. Some will have experienced that on ciao, some very anal retentive types here that love to remind you of your place. I have met many over the years. I mellowed a lot in recent years on judging people, especially on appearance, after I went traveling around the globe meeting lots of interesting people. But social class has always been rampant in the UK. Believe it or not but everyone in the high street that many of us sneer at because they act and look a certain way have a story that’s not what you expect, and often more likeable and intelligent than they seem. I’m constantly amazed how interesting people are and how other people will always judge them buy what they are wearing or the way they talk, rather than what they have to say. The true middle-class has a certain way they speak that makes them instantly recognizable. They also act in a predictable way that makes them vulnerable. You see that reflected on message boards and opinion sites, often assaulted with Google facts and figures by the thought police when we try to have our own unique opinion on things, ciao our microcosm of life.