It might be tempting to say that he who laughs last laughs loudest.
But there’s a better, more important message to be drawn from the image in this article.
Earlier this week, Ángel Di María returned to former club, Manchester United, to play against them for PSG (current club) in the Champions League.
It’s fair to say that he didn’t have a great time as a Manchester United player, notwithstanding his exceptional talent.
The response he received from the Manchester crowd this week was nothing short of hostile – they booed him from the moment he stepped off the team bus.
But when he was sworn at, mocked and had a bottle thrown at him by fans, having been shoved into the metal railings, things changed.
The level of Di María’s performance shot through the roof – he was instrumental in both goals in a significant 2-0 away win for PSG.
Perhaps his former teammates and fans thought that he was a weak, sensitive soul who could be bullied out of the game.
But, as one commentator noted, they overlooked the fact that he had successfully come through the tough, macho culture of Argentine football.
They didn’t respect his character beyond their limited perception of him.
And they pushed him too far – he would not be humiliated.
The question, then, is: Do we respect others as whole, unique individuals, or do we rely on our own limited external perceptions of them to put them in boxes?
People are more than the labels that are ascribed to them.
As Carl Jung put it:
“[The individual] is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can neither be known nor compared with anything else.”
Here’s to respecting each other more as individuals with unique contributions to make – and not seeing each other merely as labels that can be understood completely and definitively through limited external perceptions.