Respect

1) What is Respect?

Respect for me is accepting others for who they are, including both their strengths and weaknesses. Every person is different and that is what makes us a diverse society. Accepting those differences and not insulting or being rude to them means respect. It also means that there are boundaries that should not be crossed. These boundaries are social lines that should not be crossed under any circumstance. These boundaries change depending on who it is (friend, colleague, family member, etc) and the time you have known that person. The more familiar the person, the fewer boundaries there are, and the higher up in society, the more respect and admiration they deserve. For example, the boundaries towards your boss are difference than your friends’ because there are many conversational topic that you don’t discuss with your boss in order to not cross those lines. In all, respecting someone is admiring him/her for strengths and not criticizing for weaknesses.

2) What does respect look like?

Respect presents itself in different ways in different cultures. In the western world, respect was often shown as how conservative people dressed or spoke to each other. For example, in order to go to church, women had to wear long skirts and use a veil in their head. This showed that they had respect toward religion and God. Now days, people exhibit these respect traits less in a physical way because each person wants to be free in their development of personality that came about the cultural revolution in the 1960s. People now dress more liberally, but it doesn’t mean we have lost al respect towards one another. Respect is shown today on the way we interact with other people, having in mind that communication in our culture has become much more informal and thus the meaning of respect has adapted to it. On the other side of the spectrum, the Arab and Asian countries still show respect in the dress code, mannerisms and cultural exchanges. In Korea and Japan, people show respect towards elders by bowing to them. In Africa, many tribes have long adopted in rituals that show respect, either to other human beings or to mother nature. At the end, what is important is not how respect is showed, but that it is indeed present. What is difficult now in this digital era is figuring out what are the boundaries and through which means (conversation, Facebook, etc) it is showed.

3) What has to happen inside you before you can display respect to someone?

The answer to this question is simple: respecting yourself. However, decipher this millenary proverb requires a lot of self-examination. During my college years, my classmates and friends have challenged me to think about this because in the culture that I come from, most people are the similar. Then, when I met people from all around the world the cultural norm told me that I had to respect everybody but I did not know what that meant. Each year, I learned that in order to respect others, you must respect yourself first. This means discovering and accepting your strengths and weaknesses, beliefs and culture. And then say, “since I am different in this crowd because of xyz, then my neighbor has the same right I have to be different”. The cultural diversity is founded upon the principle of accepting and understanding other people. At the end, you are just another person in the system and so is your neighbor, so “treat your neighbor as you would treat yourself”.