Judgement fair or not

November 7-2013 Judgments, Fair or Not Most of the time; we are Judged by our looks, color of skin and nationality. It does not matter how hard you try to be a better person, to be a professional, to have a decent job, to be acknowledged for what you are and not how you look, people still first see what is in the outside.

In the short story “Flight Patterns” by Sherman Alexie gives a very good example of how society stereotypes a person. Alexie used stereotypes to show readers that instead of Judging of appearances we should get to know a person first. In the short story by Alexie, we see how stereotyping takes place in the life of William the main character, a salesman that has to travel a lot and leave his family behind while he travels.

In the short story we see that William has a strong statement where he describe himself and give a good example where he wanted his fellows travelers to know exactly who and what he was: “l am a Native American and therefore have ten thousand more reasons to terrorize the U. S. than any of those Taliban Jerks-offs, but I have chosen to become a civic American citizen, so all you hite folks should be celebrating my kindness and moral decency and awesome ability to forgive! “(para 57).

This quote where William shows us the two paths a person can chose and where it could be to be against everybody because you feel that people puts you apart because of your looks and not your knowledge, or you can chose a path were your believes are more strong and are difficult to brake because you know where you come from and nobody can change that fact, also you know that by forgive the ignorance of the people that treat you like a thing and not like a human een that has something important to teach and show.

By doing this William kind of express the a small victory because he was able to understand how to deal with people that treated as if he was an Indian, a Pakistani, a Latino, a Mussulmen and because of that he has to go thru more strict inspections in the airport by the immigration people. He became used to the ignorance of people over the years, but he still gets irked because they are people still thinking they can have the rights to do whatever they want or desire.

On the other hand we have a character Fedaku a taxi river that William meet in one of his flights, Fedaku it is an interesting character because he shows William that sometimes there are that you have to take for the safety of the people you love in this case the family he had to leave in his native country. He describes the type of life he had back in his country with his family and also the circumstances that made him come to the United States and ended up driving a taxi.

Fedaku gives a good explanation of his life to William was surprised because deep in his mind he did not expect that somebody that is driving a cap had o sacrifice so many thinks because of others people. Fedaku explained “l was a smart child. A genius. A prodigy. It was Selassie who sent me to Oxford. And there I studied physics and learned the math and art of flight. I came back home and flew Jets for Selassie’s army’ (para147). ery shocking but at the same interesting because you would never think that a cab driver have all this knowledge, there is when you ask yourselt now a person that nas all that knowledge instead ot driving a cab is not flying a plane or is a professor in University giving physics classes. Later on he xplain the reasons of why he ended living in Unites States “For three years, I killed my own people, and then on the third of June 1974, I could not do it anymore, I kissed my wife and sons goodbye that morning, and I kissed my mother and father, and I lie to them and told them I would be back that evening.

They had no idea where I was going. But I went to the base, got into a plane, and flew 57). This make me think how we misjudge a person from Just their looks and how important it is to get to know them because mostly of the time it will teach you something that could e bad or good everything depends on how you take it. In this case William was able to understand him because he felt related to him because as Fedaku said before “people think I’m black, they don’t see me as a terrorist, only as a crackhead addict on welfare.

So I am a victim of only one misguided idea about who I am” (para 113). And by knowing his story he really understands that everyone has to go thru many things that other could not even imagine being able to achieve their goals. And it proves that everybody Judge you because of you looks and skin color, but they do not stop hinking for a moment to get to know as a person that has feelings, rights and is able to have a moderate conversation. A person is more than the eye can see.

Therefore William understood Fedaku feelings. Also we see the characters are very different but at the same time equal. Why are they equal, you may ask? They are equal in a way they have been discriminated and treated them as if they are like criminals in many places, they are able to understand each other in their own language that has been learn in the world by the experiences they been thru, and the understanding of both he characters was very clear from the author.

Also the author make the shorts story a bit more intriguing because there was something in Fedaku that did not convinced William too much. Sometimes is better to do not know too much about a person because it could retaliate in a positive and also negative way, because sometimes is better to not know everything about a person because we are humans and therefore there is ego a Jealousy in it.

Sometimes we are not able to understand or to take someone’s story or experience because we can think or give different interpretations, or example we van think that everything is a lie and start to have an internal argument to Just to look for the bad thinks about the person’s experienced, or we could take kind of offensive because we are not able to understand that not everybody has the same story that we have different stories in different environment and different consequences.