Persecution, as inferred by various authors in Wikipediais the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms. The inflicting of suffering, harassment, isolation, imprisonment, fear, or pain are all factors that may establish persecution. Even so, not all suffering will necessarily establish persecution. The suffering experienced by the victim must be sufficiently severe. The threshold level of severity has been a source of much debate." In simpler words to the current era, I would classify it as Gossip! In the world today, yes, it still exist, the infliction of suffering, harassment, ostracising, etc., not physically but emotionally using verbal actions. As elaborated in the quote above, the common forms of persecution are religious, ethnic and political. All of which have and are interrelated to the current norm of society - for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as children, we are taught to love one another for it was clearly stated in Bible, "... you must love one another, just as I have loved you."- John 13: 34 (New Jerusalem Bible). Yet, having been taught so, in majority Churches, social persecution is taking place, religiously, etchnicly and politically. Having said so, how different are we from years or should I say centuries ago!!?
Moving on, we encounter a word no different from our friend above, Discrimination, in Wikipedia described as, "is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group." Hmm, not too far aren't we. I would rename the word to or probably classify groups with such behavioural symptoms as 'clique'. Not only is it a familiar word at schools but it most places too, such as workplaces. The usual scenario, in a class or some other place, various groups consisting of various personas would already have been form. A good example would be from the movie, High School Musical or even the TV serial, Glee, wherein there are the popular kids such as the cheerleaders, the basketball team and so on; and on the other hand you have the 'doormat' groups consisting kids or rather teens called geeks and nerds or even the ugly and gloomy ones. So what happens when a new kid from outta town comes into the picture, he/she has the problem of fitting in cause you either have to be popular to sit with the upper class or a complete nerd to sit with the middle-class. If you can't do neither, you are a lower-class citizen, who belongs in limbo! But then again, my friends, this is only a fictional situation, looking at reality, how many of us feel the deja-vu~?
To sum it all up in a conclusion, I bring in my final "witness to the stand", Execution, or rather in my own summary, Man-made Execution. Unlike, what is described in dictionaries or Wikipedia, the perfect example to what a "man-made execution" is like, I give the current TV serial Gossip Girl, it tells of how social persecution and discrimination plays a big part in the upper society of Manhattan, and how those with completely no power suffer the worst off. But then again, you can also see how even those from the middle or lower-class can achieve with just a little help from the executioner, Gossip Girl herself. You think the writer of the series just wrote it out of a whim, I think not, the author would have either experienced it or had observed it from a third-person view. So how exactly are we different from the past? Doesn't my equation sum up to how uncivil-minded and immature the society we live in is and how it victimises the people around them. Don't always judge a book by its cover, for the truth is always written in the pages between.
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