While it is minimal, I do have some bits of diversity in my life and I use it to build foundations to make myself a better person. My uncle who suffered a traumatic brain injury because of a car crash that nearly took his life has helped me understand the struggle of being disabled. While I will never know what being disabled is truly like, I can empathize because of his experience. Despite my limited contact with other races, I have found friendships with people of other races and that has most certainly helped me partially understand what it's like to live as a non-white in this country. I have ADHD which definitely is a part of how I learn in everyday life and affects me in ways that not everybody knows about. My contact with females in my life has also helped me understand how to treat and respect women the right way even though I don’t have much contact with females because for the last four years I have gone to an all-boys school. In my family I have been exposed to different worlds, on my dad’s side I have an Irish Catholic grandmother and a Basque grandfather, while on my mom’s side I have an grandfather who is Jewish and a grandmother who is evangelical Christian. The diversity of ethic groups in my family has shown me the lives of four different upbringings and that definitely shapes my world view in at least some sense. It has also shown me the customs and cultures from all around Europe and has exposed me to things that help shape who I am.

    Nobody can choose who they are, you get brought into this world and like everybody you get dealt a hand of cards and you play with what you got. I got dealt a royal flush, the best hand you could ask for. Did I ask for it? No, but I have it and I use that hand to live the best life I can. What I really mean is that nobody can choose which race or gender or parents you get, it just happens. The same way nobody chooses the things in life that makes life diverse.

    But we thrive in diversity because it is what makes us unique as humans and if there was no diversity at all, we would lose the very nature of what it means to be human. Diversity helps people grow because if you only interact with people just like you, you are stuck looking at a mirror of yourself all of the time. The only way to grow as a person is to interact with people who are different and by seeing how they live you learn the way they experience life and you then connect better with others that are not like you.

  We need diversity, because without it we fall victim to the idea that everybody that is unlike us is foreign and we are unable to connect, thus creating a divide in society. One of the greatest things about the human race is our diversity and the power that comes with it.

     Alone we are nothing. It is only when we are together that we have power and peace as humans.