Friday, July 10, 2009.

it's convenient and easy to say that everything in life can be properly split and differentiated into a few categories, all mutually exclusive to one another (otherwise known in set notation as A-intersect-B equals to zero).

that, however, is a very naïve thought (though i confess i sometimes wish life could be simplified as such), and especially so in the case of standard differences.

basically.

i do not deny that there are the elite amongst the elite within the community. this is a natural phenomena in life - the presence of a creme de la creme (screw the weird slope-y things on them) in any field, the bell-shaped curve of any normal distribution (sorry for the maff. unintentional i promise.)

they get nurtured. and sadly. the problems start arising.

take the GEP for instance. Smuggled out from normal school in Pri 4, they (i will remain objective and not refer to myself in any way) were groomed, hidden from the rest of the world, fed with multivitamins and speshul powars, and subsequently turned into mutated cyber-robots, ready to serve the country and use their ultimate brain juices to obliterate the rest of the world into mush.

Or that's what people thought. (though there is a degree of truth to whatever mentioned above)

and as such, geppers were treated with scorn. avoided like the plague, shunned as if brain juice leaked out from the dermis, they basically were treated as DIFFERENT individuals. people who were WEIRD, SPESHUL and ABNORMAL.

this cannot be solely attributed to the non-geppers. having been TAUGHT, explicitly or implicitly, that they were different, geppers also share similar mindsets, that they are SPESHUL and ABNORMAL, a 'cut above the rest', that they are mutants and viral breeds.

let's go back to my preamble about differentiated groups. what GEP did was to demarkate the borders between DAMN SMART and NOT DAMN SMART people. however, it failed (by no fault of anyone for that matter) to account for the people near the cutoff boundary.

as such, most people (at least I believe so) are of GEP calibre. rephrased, it means that the TRUE mutated people number much less.

which means, for the large majority of people concerned, people in special education programmes by and large aren't REALLY different from the other people. perceived differences make ALL the difference, which to a certain extent annoys me.

ultimately, what's the difference between an RA person and a non-RA person? mutated oversized brain? special drugs? how do you tell the difference between a HP and a non-HP student?

there people go, ostracizing and ill-treating (to a certain degree) people from 'special programmes', which DOES irk me to a certain extent. ultimately, we are ALL humans, and as such there should really be no special way we treat people from different 'stratas'.

which brings me to another point - how people treat others from 'lower' 'stratas'.

somehow, it's nearly impossible for people who believe highly of themselves to make friends with people LOWER in status. it's demeaning for them, highly impossible for themselves to drop to someone else's level, and somehow very embarrassing.

which is something i cannot stand.

perceived differences make a big BIG impact on society eh.

Labels: Life