East is East, and West is West - and You and I are We

When it comes to opposites - regardless whether they are due to religion, countries of origin, gender or other differences - a lot of people feel about them as they read in Kipling's poem "The Ballad of East and West":

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment seat;

- and doing this, it is absolutely without importance whether they know the individual to which they thereby compare themselves.
But in that way, we not only neglect to acknowledge the indivitual, we also neglect the following two lines in the poem:

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

- that is: when two persons stand face to face, it is no longer possible to generalise. At this point, there really are only two individuals - who of course have their differences, but that should not be reason to let them be subject to generalisations; they should be seen as very special human beings - both of them.
Just as we ourselves like to be treated as individual human beings, we have a special duty to threat the people we meet in the same way.
(Translated from Øst er øst, og vest er vest - og du og jeg er vi, originally published May 1, 2018)

On the topic of individuals

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had the pleasure - if you add stopovers to the count as well - to have visited six different countries, and in this context, I am saddened by how easily we tend to generalize: people who come from the country X, behaves in a way Y.
Of course, we can look at things as statistics and add up percentages of people from different populations who have given characteristics, but there's one thing that's important to keep in mind: when face to face with a another person from another country, it's extremely important not to generalize. Basically, you do not face "a person from the country X", which is why you should not form the assumption that "this person behaves in the way Y". No, you are faced with an individual, to whom you owe the common courtesy to assess her based on her personal characteristics - not based on statistics for people who come from the same country as she does.
And there are many other contexts in which the fact that a person belongs to a group of people does not automatically justify us categorizing her as belonging in a certain basket - as long as we do not know the individual person, we have no basis for categorization.
(Translated from Noget om enkeltpersoner)