Tag Archives: society

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.

It’s not all black and white

I’ve referred to this before, but not only are the answers to our society’s problems in shades of grey rather than black or white, so are our races & the way we view them.

Our society doesn’t have a clue as to how bigoted we really are until we actually stop & think about the people who we call “Black”. For the record, I prefer the terms Black & White for those races because I don’t use euphemisms, except that I’ve somehow gotten trapped into using the word “issue” at times when I mean “problem”, at least when I trying to sell a “problem” on somebody as an “issue”, but I prefer to call the so-called African-Americans “Black” & the Caucasian European-Americans “White”. So sue me or call me archaic in that respect; I can live with that, but let’s call it what it is.  After all, aren’t Egyptians & the various Muslim-based Saharan tribes of North Africa & the whites in South Africa actually African-American if they come here to live, even though these people don’t have black or dark brown skin?  Calling someone who’s Black an African-American isn’t being completely truthful, and to step away from the word “Black” by Blacks means that they’ve accepted that the word “Black” is a negative connotation that they don’t want to be a part of, and that’s truly lamentable, as we White people are the root cause of that.

We call Maya Rudolph & President Obama “Black”, but they are neither — they are mixed-race, being 50/50 White & Black, and since the term “mixed race” implies “impurity” as to race & because they have an ounce of Black blood (the ancient “one-drop” rule), our society automatically calls them Black, which is a negative in the eyes of White society if they have any color other than White in their ethnicity.

But the fact is, they’re as White as they are Black if they’re 50/50 White & Black. So think about this — if they aren’t called “White” because they aren’t 100% White, why should they be called “Black” if they’re not 100% Black?

As far as changing society’s ills & our preoccupation for what color you are, it won’t change socially until there is a desire for change in the masses, and it probably won’t change in our lifetimes and probably not in our grandkids’ lifetimes either. Blacks have been free for appx 150 years and it’s been a slow climb to get where they are now (which isn’t nearly where they should be by now & not entirely their fault by any means), and a lot of their brothers & sisters haven’t made the climb very well, if at all. They have freedom, but they don’t have true acceptance or universal social equality here or abroad, and they have a lot of problems within their own society that might not be cured anytime in the next 50 years — it took the White Italian immigrants about 100 years to rise out of the slums and be accepted as mainstream Americans & move to the suburbs, and there are still times that they have trouble gaining acceptance among the more pearly-white Americans of Northern European backgrounds.

Politics preys on the weak

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Politics should not be about increasing the wealth & power of only certain individuals or segments of our population who clearly don’t need its help, including special-interest groups.  It should be about ideals that bring society together on a just & fair plane with a better societal direction & working to rectify problems, achieve goals & maintain a fair societal balance rather than separating us into unequal divisions fueled by hate, greed & egotistical values.

Our people should be taken care of in all their basic needs as needed, such as adequate safe housing that has access to proper infrastructure such as sanitary sewer/septic systems, public water & electricity, free & proper health care, treatment for mental issues & addictive disorders and given basic food if they cannot afford it. However, this help should be temporary and only as-needed, and those “in the system” need to be trained & educated to get out of it quickly, and failure to do so should land them in a minimum-security “educational prison” until they learn a trade they can use to earn a living. Many homeless are so simply of their own choosing/doing, and many people getting welfare refuse to improve themselves to try & get off it.

Unlike animals, our human minds are naturally geared toward compassion, reason & rationalization in a zero-sum game rather than being polar opposites fighting for survival — instead, we are taught to hate those who are different & see things differently & we despise the weak & less-fortunate in our society.

We do that because we’ve been taught to win at all costs & punish those who don’t make the grade for whatever reason, and that’s what will cost us as a society at some point — we’re paying for it now by worshiping people who have no business being idolized simply because our society looks upon them as strong, beautiful, or some other appealing yet superficial trait.

Until we can treat all of our citizens with respect, and until all our citizens work to earn that respect, we will be doomed to mediocrity.