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By Bob Minor
Minor Details
There is a lot of talk about American ideals. But on this Independence
Day I'm afraid they look more like these:
We value corporate executives if they keep stock prices up, not if they
produce a product that enhances human life or spend corporate profits to
maintain water and air that won't kill us.
Our politicians tell us, unlike those of most nations, that killing a
killer is a way to teach us that killing someone doesn't solve anything.
We execute a man who robs a convenience store and kills one clerk for
$45 in order to buy food for his family, but tobacco executives who knew
their product was deadly, spiked cigarettes with further nicotine to
make it more addictive, targeted our teens, covered-up their crime, paid
off our politicians, killed millions of people, and made billions of
dollars, we let off if they promise not to advertise their product
inappropriately. And teach that that is justice.
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We teach our boys that they can receive medals for killing other men but
will be killed for loving other men, all in the name of American
manhood.
We actually use words like "do-gooder," "liberal," "bleeding heart,"
"tolerant," "sensitive" and "welfare" as putdowns.
We use sex to sell our goods and services and make people feel guilty if
they ever should act sexually.
We use words like "virtue" (as in "she lost her virtue") and
"immorality" (as in "nations fall when immorality becomes rampant") and
we mean sex, not how we treat the needy among us or value our neighbors. |
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We are suspicious of anyone who is having too much fun. Pleasure should
be put off till later.
We assume our "better" workers will be workaholics, as if it isn't a
fatal disease that destroys families, relationships, and individuals.
We allow half of the human beings in our country to make only 75% of
what the other half makes for the same work just because they are
female. We won't pass an Equal Rights Amendment.
We teach our boys that the worse thing they can be is "a girl" - throw
like a girl, run like a girl, talk like a girl -- and that rubs off on
the confidence of our girls too.
We teach our girls that, though they may try to do otherwise, their real
value is in sacrificing their own dreams to please a man and live for
their children. They should feel guilty if they don't.
 We teach boys to be violent in sports and life in order to prove they
are real men. Then we lock them up when they actually act it out, unless
it makes money for a team owner.
We take people of different shades of pink-, peach-, and cream-colored
skin and lump them together as "white" so that they don't fight among
themselves and so they have privileges that people with darker skins
don't have.
We have an economy which needs war in order to keep it going. If we were
not the major arms supplier to the world and our tax money didn't
subsidize a giant weapons industry, our economy would collapse.
We value heroes who shoot over-sized guns like Rambo and Arnold, and put
down those who propose other ways to solve our problems.
We criticize workers when they do cooperate together in labor unions
even though if they hadn't stood up against the guns of our police and
military we wouldn't have an eight-hour workday, a five-day workweek,
any workers' benefits, the idea of "overtime," or any control on
employers' greed.
We are the only civilized nation in the world that does not value all
human beings enough to guarantee adequate health care because our
insurance companies wouldn't make huge profits and we'd have to wait in
line for tummy-tucks, face-lifts, and breast enhancements.
We have developed a national wage structure which promotes dependency in
richer people - dependent upon service personnel receiving low wages so
they can live their lifestyle. Yet we fear that "the poor" might become
"dependent" on others.
We blame undocumented aliens for problems created by Savings and Loan
crashes, political paybacks, and the failures of our corporate leaders
to plan the future beyond their own stock options, while even our
politicians hire them to do their yard work, babysitting, and house
cleaning.
We have happily created and value an economic gap between the top and
the bottom which out-paces any third world country.
We value newspapers with full sections devoted to sports ("It's just a
game." Right!) and only one or two pages to understanding what's going
on in the world.
We talk a good line about the value of education and how valuable our
children are, but we pay teachers and anyone else who is responsible for
our children so poorly that even our children get the message that we
really value almost anything more than education.
We believe that we should pay attention to the moral preaching of an
organization we've made our largest Protestant denomination, the
Southern Baptist Convention, even though it was founded to promote
slavery. That gives them the right to scold us?
We hunt through the Bible, religion and our traditions to find verses,
pronouncements and long-held attitudes in order to promote our current
prejudices.
Now these are the values of a society that says that transgendered and
bisexual people and lesbians and gay men are sick and immoral because
LGBT believe people should have the right to love anyone? How did we
ever start believing that?
Our country has so much possibility, but it is very sick. We can choose
to buy into this sickness in order to fit in, or we can affirm our right
to love, we can say the problem is not us, and we can change things.
This society is crazy. LGBT people are just fine -- unless they join in.
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D. is Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of Kansas and author of the Scared Straight: Why It's
So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human.
He may be reached at Minor@libertypress.net
or on the web at www.fairnessproject.net
Courtesy of Liberty Press: www.libertypress.net
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