notes from school
so we learned about the universal declaration of human rights and part of article 2 says 'no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self governing or under any other limitation sovereignity'1
my teacher told us that it basically means 'don't discriminate people by where they're from or where they live' but then people do that all the time, and chances are you've also worshipped a western developed country for the sole reason of being western and developed. and then she talked about this one time when she went to guam. when she was in the hotel, she heard an old woman talk to her daughter about her trip, and she said something along the lines of 'i'm in the united states' and not 'i'm in guam' really proudly. chances are, the teacher said, that person probably thought of the united states better than guam, and thought since she's in the united states she's also a cool person. and it's not and you shouldn't think some places/countries are inherently better than other ones.
which reminded me of one of my friends from english hakwon who's been to germany because of the choir group she was in. and i thought that was really cool. there were a lot of kids who's been to japan or china or southeast asia, but for some reason i thought germany was objectively cooler. so yeah maybe that's one time i thought a country was inherently better than another one.
however, there might be other reasons!
- my friend went to germany not just because of a family trip like most of mine who go overseas, it was because she worked hard for it.
- she has a german friend and that is genuinely so cool, like emphasis on friend, not german. the fact that she has a friend from another country and she keeps in contact with them is fascinating and makes that different from other trips of my friends.
- going to germany is rarer than somewhere in asia.
idk why i'm writing this, but maybe this is gonna be helpful to future me :/
in korean it sounded super easy when i read it. is it just that korean's my dominant language for everything except conlanging and emotional rants?↩