Six billion people, six billion unique beings, and yet so many of them are unfairly grouped together based on unfair and arbitrarily parallels selected. In common terms, prejudice is an illogical and disgusting aspect of human syndrome. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara, both child survivors of the war in Sierra Leone, know prejudice on a very personal level. Beah, a young boy and future soldier during the war, experiences very different prejudices than Mariatu, a young girl and mother, during the country's bloody conflict. Although experience and practice bring unfair prejudices, Beah's experience was far more negative and destructive than Kamara's. Child soldiers, like Beah, are a subject of extreme moral controversy, but in his Journal on Military Ethics, Dan Zupan says it best: That the child posed a real threat is undeniable. It is reasonable to conclude that if someone raises a gun, points it at you, and then cocks the gun, they intend to shoot you. Given that the person is operating in a hostile environment where people regularly shoot at you, the conclusion seems particularly justified. In fact, it seems unreasonable, irresponsible, even negligent, not to shoot at this threat. (Zupan 1) Beah never carries a gun when he first enters a small village, but after seeing so many children perform this act, the villagers almost regularly, he is a potential killer. The villagers had become accustomed to young boys shooting at them regularly. Even after being fed by an individual in a village for weeks, Beah and his friends are still almost executed based on speculation alone (Beah 66). Just because he's a twelve year old boy, all the natives of Beah's home country, like... middle of paper... his own tribesmen at gunpoint, Beah, always finds a way to be impassive and point the gun at them when given the chance. He couldn't let his preconceived notions about the enemy disappear so easily. Kamara is at least able to sympathize with the beggars when she sees them in London, even though their lives were far more luxurious than hers. It may seem easy to try to organize the 6 billion humans that coexist on Earth, but it is simply not possible; prejudices have no place on this earth because they accomplish nothing. Works Cited Kamara, Mariatu and Susan McClelland. The bite of the mango. [Toronto]: Annick, 2008. Print. Well, Ishmael. A Long Road Traveled: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print. Zupan, Dan. “THE CHILD SOLDIER: NEGLIGENT RESPONSE TO A THREAT.” Host. EBSCO, December 2011. Web. November 14. 2013.