Krieghan Riley
America. The Great Cultural Melting Pot. A wonderful notion, isn't it? There are countless religions, moral beliefs, political opinions, racial stocks, social classes, and genders (well, not so many of those) throughout the world, and it's nice to think of the United States as a sort of common ground. A place where different sorts of people come to be accepted, perhaps because there are sacred few places that will do just that. They come, in short, to melt together (hence the name). But things are changing, and in a few short years I don't think the term will be at all applicable. Perhaps even at this moment it has lost much of its meaning.
In the future, America won't be simply many races melting together into a cultural hodgepodge. There will be one "race", and I don't mean this in a psychotic holocaust way. The internet, and along with it Email and Chat Rooms, has already begun the process. On the internet, we are all members of the "Pseudorace," which consists only of bits of information about us, some of which may be fraudulent. There's no real way of telling who's who. A person you may be "chatting" with might, in fact, be someone completely different from the person you're imagining. Perhaps it's something small like a racial or cultural difference, or maybe it's something huge like the person's moral beliefs. Maybe they believe in an outrageous form of capital punishment that you find disgusting and gruesome. Maybe they're a supremacist, and you find such nonsense to be foolishness.
If you bring it into a certain light, this is a good thing. You can't very well judge someone for the color of their skin when they're presentation to you is simply a paragraph or two of text. Are we going to start judging people for the font face they use (that's hilarious if you really think about it)? Maybe for the grammar they use (this could be the beginning of an educational revolution - using peer pressure to improve someone's English skills)? You can see how life will become much different in this day in age of awesome tech advances.
But then there's what you see in the bad light. Our society thrives on embracing our differences, and how can you do that if there aren't any? We will finally become the uniform society that most of use dread. Also, if we can't distinguish who someone is, we may form a blind relationship with a convicted computer criminal who can easily gain our personal information. It is a brave new age, and this is a scary idea if we don't handle it in a proper way.
In this new age of the Pseudorace, as I so jokingly refer to it, differences will become much less distinguished. It is important that we hold our own opinions as we would gold, for they are the only things by which to tell ourselves apart in this brave new world.
