IT ALL BEGINS WITH A QUESTION

I've realized just recently how important it is to question what many perceive to be as "facts". There is a scene in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini that emphasizes this point. Amir had read one of his mother's history books mentioning Hazaras, second-class citizens in Afghanistan. This was a rarity because his textbooks were very vague in describing their culture. In it, Amir was confronted with the truth of how his people, the Pashtuns, demoralized Hazaras, to the point where it is indefinite at whether to consider it a massacre or not (at least in my interpretation). It was the brutal truth. When he approached his teacher to inquire more about this, his teacher brushed it off, and said that they were merely trying to pass themselves as "martyrs". It really struck me that the teacher is so ignorant, that even with the education he has, he still believes that Hazaras are inferior. Education is freedom. And in the teacher's acceptance of how things are, he is only promoting history to repeat again. This is also relative to 1984's Winston, who understood that things could be better, that with knowledge comes liberation. And it all begins with a question...