Six billion people, six billion unique beings, and yet so many of them are unfairly lumped together based on unfair and arbitrarily selected parallels. In common parlance, prejudice is an illogical and disgusting aspect of the 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 completely different prejudices than Mariatu, a young girl and mother, during the country's bloody conflict. Despite experiencing and practicing unfair prejudice, 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 it, that they intend to shoot you. Since the person does this in a hostile environment where people shoot at you regularly, the conclusion seems especially justified. Indeed, it seems unreasonable, irresponsible, even negligent, not to fire on this threat. (Zupan 1)Beah never carries a weapon with him when he first enters small villages, but after seeing so many children perform this almost routine act, he is a potential killer. Villagers had become accustomed to boys regularly shooting at them. Even after being fed for weeks by an individual from a village, Beah and his friends are still almost executed based solely on speculation (Beah 66). Just because he is a twelve year old boy, all the natives of Beah's home country like... middle of paper... his tribe members under fire Beah, still finds a way to be emotionless and point the gun against them when given the opportunity. He couldn't let his preconceived ideas about the enemy vanish so easily. Kamara is at least able to sympathize with beggars when she sees them in London, despite how much more luxurious their lives were compared to hers. It may seem easy to try to organize the 6 billion human beings who live together on Earth, but it is not possible; prejudice has no place on this earth because it accomplishes nothing. Works Cited Kamara, Mariatu, and Susan McClelland. The bite of the mango. [Toronto]: Annick, 2008. Print.Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Print. Zupan, Dan. “THE CHILD SOLDIER: NEGLIGENT RESPONSE TO A THREAT.” Guest. EBSCO, December 2011. Web. November 14. 2013.