So I had the chance to read a short story called Meat. A popular story, I guess, that many people enjoy reading. When, in reality, it was nothing but confusion for me. Until I made a connection. You see, I was reading as if the two beings talking were human and the "meat" creatures were some otherworldly creature. When its the complete opposite. The "meat" beings are the humans and the two things talking are of another world.
And so, the story started to make a little more sense. The aliens discovered humans and called us nothing but meat. How can meat talk, sing? Meat, capable of thinking?! And they asked themselves the question who wants to talk to talking meat? So, therefore, they threw us to the sidelines on the assumption we are incapable of thinking, of having intelligence.
It makes me wonder, how can someone pass biased standards upon another person, without first looking at themselves? Were the aliens so prideful and arrogant that no other race, especially "meat", could be of any substance? Or were they scared because the "meat" truly was intelligent? Maybe even more so than the aliens. Yet in the end, another race is welcomed back into the group and called intelligent. Why do they get to decide who is intelligent and not? It is not their job.
You can only discover one's intelligence by first discovering and understanding them.
The very end closed the story with "...Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone..." but yet they left the humans all alone.
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