symbols, keywords and other cues to our environment

There is a great bumper sticker out there,  (coexist) and it has a lot of variations, but every time I see it, I like the person whose car it is on.  I don't know them, and it might have been slapped on there five minutes ago while they were in a store---by the person that was different than them and that they had just cussed out.  I'm responding to the bumper sticker and not the person.  It represents something that is positive to me.
Symbols represent.  They give us clues.  They help us know if something is good or bad, safe or dangerous, desireable or worthy of avoidance.  And which is which is frequently taught to us by our beliefs.  Most of us get those from the people that raised us and while we rebel about speeding and seatbelts, getting high and safe sex, we rarely rebel against the beliefs we were taught as children.
When we do rebel against those beliefs, it is usually more reaction-formation than an actual examination of the beliefs.  We have all met at least one person raised in a home with strict fundamentalist religious beliefs (any religion--they all have families like that) that becomes the biggest atheist or satanist fundamentalist that could exist--reactionary to the point that their whole life is taken up with going against the teachings of their family.  They are consumed with being the opposite and do not even admit that anything except the opposite exists as a possibility.  They can not see that they are as blind to the other possible beliefs as their family that raised them was.  They would only recognize two symbols, the one of their childhood--which they now hate, the one of their current belief, and the rest would be meaningless.
We give symbols their meanings.  But a symbol doesn't have to be a drawing or visual representation of a religion.  It can be anything.  It can be detected by any sense.  And it can be meaningful to an entire culture or only to a single individual.
Currently, we are having riots in a neighborhood outside of St. Louis, and the symbols involved in that are both highly recognized, and unspeakable.  The face of the young black male and the blue uniform.  While the first should not be a symbol, it has been for a very long time.  And it means very different things to different people. We know through discussions of profiling that the young black male is supposed to be violent, criminal, and the list could go on and on from here.  Show someone a picture of a young black male and ask them to tell you what he is doing in the picture, the stories will be different depending upon the culture and background of the person you ask.  The picture itself has no meaning except the meaning placed on it by the person telling the story.  The same is true of a picture of a person in a police uniform, and while the sex and race of the person in the uniform may make a difference depending upon the beliefs of the person telling the story, the story of the young black male in the blue uniform will not be the same as the story told for the first picture.  The uniform is its own symbol.
We are rioting now, and it is spreading because being a symbol causes a person to lose their individuality.  They are judged as the symbol and all the connotations the symbol has to the person doing the judging.  And we are all judging.  It's what we do.  We recognize patterns and sort things into groups.  It is why we can accomplish so many things, and why we do so much evil.  Obviously, the ability to recognize a nail and use it, even if it is a little different than the first nail we saw makes us able to make things, and just as obviously, our inability to judge each other without prejudging them based on appearance,culture, worklife and health and habit creates social injustice, poverty, fear and even war.
Our natural tendencies, to judge, to react, to panic, to gossip, to put things in little boxes according to our beliefs, to be loyal to what we see as "like us" and to be against what we see as "not us", makes us dangerous.  Only our own awareness of how we as people can be, how wrong, how unjust, how murderous, that awareness can help us to examine our own thoughts, our own beliefs.  We must look closely.  And it is hard to do, because of our loyalty, because we don't want to think that the people like us could be wrong, could be predators or users or any of those things we say we don't like.    But clear vision is needed, self-honesty is needed, commitment to being a good person is needed if we are going to stop hurting each other as if the other is only a symbol.
We need symbols, stop signs, international bathroom signs, red-tipped white canes, yellow cabs, even uniforms to identify people functioning in roles of service.  But people need to stop being symbols.  I know how hard it is to find even one person that is just like me---I've never really found that, so how can whole groups, cultures, countries, and continents of people be the same.
Don't react to the symbol, get to know the person.