If I am to talk to people of all ages, genders, opinions, and mentalities, then I must do so in the most basic of ways. I must show humility, which is not the same as being humble. I might not be humble because I can say that I am proud in certain circumstances. But humility is allowing myself to admit that I am ignorant in many ways. Ignorance, not idiocy. Ignorance in that I can and many never truly and completely understand what someone else has gone through. And how can I, when I have never experienced it myself? You may say then, “But yeah, that’s what sympathy is for. You can put yourself in another person’s shoes and imagine what it felt like.” But that’s just it. Imagination can only go so far. If you saw someone with a thick scar along their arm, the most you could imagine was that, “Oh, yes. That must have been pretty painful.” You can never understand if you have not had the same cut – the precise depth of pain, the feeling of the cold blade passing through your skin, the heavy wetness of blood trailing down your arm. You will not have the sound of the knife clattering to the floor forever embedded in your memory, or the dizziness of the black spots in your eyes. You won’t even have the white scar afterwards. So, yes, you can sympathize, but never empathize.

I do not know the intricate details of misogyny or racism or gender-equality discrimination, to name a few, but I do understand a few fundamental truths. “All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten,” to quote a favorite author of mine, Robert Fulghum. Actually, I’d like to include an excerpt from his book.
“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):

1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don't hit people.
4. Put things back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
6. Don't take things that aren't yours.
7. Say you're SORRY when you HURT somebody.
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first words you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.”

There’s almost nothing I can add to this, and Mr. Fulghum is a real gem of a man. However, I would like to relate his wise words to some situations, as the wisdom seems to slip from our grasp when we most need it, apparently.

If you would like to know if and why rape is bad, then allow me to simplify the situation. Human contact eliminates the need for words in so many ways. A caress across the cheek could mean, “I love you,” or “Do you have a fever?” or “It’s going to be alright”. But imagine this – a mother is running her hand along her son’s forehead to see if he’s burning up. That’s perfectly acceptable, sweet even. However, you will rarely see a mother leave her seat on the train and run her hand along another woman’s son’s forehead. Why? Because that is not her son. It is neither her duty nor her right to touch someone whom she does not know. Even if she did know the boy, he is not her family and so she will need to ask his permission to touch him. This makes sense, right? But say you want to counter this with, “Wait, so what you’re saying is, if it’s family, then you can do what you want? So you can rape your own son by these standards?”

Let me break this down even further. Forget the complicated relationships and boundaries of family and non-family. You are a human. I am a human. We are ninety-nine percent the same. I would not hurt myself or make myself uncomfortable, so why would I do that to you? If you are still not sure why rape is unacceptable, then let’s break the boundaries of sympathy and empathy. Take your thumb and index finger, grasp a piece of your skin, and pinch it hard, hard enough to leave nail impressions. Ouch, right? Let’s not do that again, right? That awful sensation is what another person will feel if you were to pinch them, too. Now take that pain, multiply it by a hundred, and add trauma, though you cannot truly feel the trauma. That is what rape would be like, if you could somehow even abstractly imagine it. Let’s not even talk about what falls under trauma, like the burning shame, the fear and paranoia, the horror. You do not like to be pinched, and neither does another person. By this equation we can infer that you do not like to be raped, and neither does another person. Rape is bad. Let’s not rape.

So, yes, I am young. I may not know a lot about this world, but I do know the basic rules. The hard truth is that we all know the rules, and if we try to understand them and accept them, then maybe we can make this world a better place.