Wherefore, Humanity?

What a week.


What happened in Paris was, undoubtedly, a tragedy. A group of evil cowards saw fit to terrorize a city in a brazen display of hatred. Unconscionable.


The greater tragedy, to me, has been the disgusting displays of hatred from my fellow Americans. I have witnessed more sickening, hateful, bile from people that I know personally, as well as from outside my personal circles. The worst by far have been the calls to arms in order to exterminate all Muslims from the face of the earth.


Let's just take a moment to digest that. I mean, honestly. All Muslims? All of them? And this, from God-fearing, red-blooded AMERICANS! The same people who lament the days of yore, when our founding fathers really stood for something! Like religious freedom!


...oh, wait. Surely, the founding fathers only meant Christianity, right? Not so much, no.


And while we're at it, Trigger Finger, because a small subset of the 1.6 BILLION Muslims are crazy terrorists, we should kill them ALL? Let's go ahead and extrapolate, then. After we're done murdering 1.6 billion people, let's go ahead an really make things right:


- By definition, all black-on-black crime is perpetrated by black people. If we kill all of them, that'll stop.


- Most serial killers are white men. We can really make everyone safe if we kill all of them, too.


- School shootings are mostly perpetrated by high school students. Let's just do them in, as well.


Heck, with just a bit more effort, I bet we could find enough justification to rid the world of humanity entirely. We'd all be safe as houses, then!


Here's the thing. Muslims aren't the enemy. Terrorists are. The average Muslim isn't any more of a danger to Joe Murican than your average Protestant. I've known several. They are just as appalled with their so-called bretheren as I am with so-called Christians who would like to see a significant percentage of the world's population murdered.


Another important point is that creating an environment in which Muslims are held apart from the rest of the world is exactly what the cowards in ISIS wants. When the West scorns Muslims at large, recruiting becomes so much easier. If we show them that we hate them, their rhetoric becomes true. The sad truth about Mr. Trump's knee-jerk vow to "bomb the shit out of ISIS" is that ISIS would love for that to happen. Their ranks would swell overnight, especially if we accidentally killed some women and kids in there, too.


And yet, angry, scared Americans are calling for blood. They are closing their borders to refugees fleeing the hell that ISIS is creating in Syria, because there might be some embedded terrorists in those groups. They are refusing the tired, poor, huddled masses because they have, in their fear, forgetting that we are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of refugees. When did we forget this? When did we forget to be human? When did we cease being a melting pot, reveling in the chance to become stronger in our diversity? Have we really lost that courage? Are we so afraid that we can no longer treat other humans as humans? Undoubtedly, there are bad guys out there who wish to do harm. You know what, though? Those people already live here. Every time some coward shoots up a school or a church or a movie theater, we are reminded of that. Those are American citizens doing the shooting.


Fellow Americans, you are breaking my heart. Please be better. The terrorists are ineffective if we don't allow ourselves to be terrorized. Remember what it is to be great, and behave accordingly. More hate is not what this world needs right now.

Symbolism

It’s been a banner week for angering conservatives. The biggest story, of course, is the ruling on marriage equality. I’m not going to talk about that here, as I’ve made my position on that abundantly clear in previous posts (In fact, “patio furniture” is the most frequent phrase I hear when people talk to me about my writing). Instead, I’d like to address the uproar over the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State Capitol, as well as the removal of the Ten Commandments from the Oklahoma State Capitol.

I’m going to come right out and say it: neither the Confederate flag nor the Ten Commandments belong anywhere in, on, or about a government facility. The base reason for both is the same. Government facilities belong to all citizens, and should not be hostile or preferential toward one subset of those citizens.

The Confederate flag is a powerful symbol. However, it is the symbol of a failed ideology. Yes, failed. The South (spoiler alert) lost the Civil War. I can't think of another example of a defeated flag carrying as much weight or being held onto as fiercely as this. That flag still has its place, and that place is a museum. Other than that, it’s just a symbol for slavery and deeply-held racism for most of the rest of the country, - if not the world - despite your “Heritage, not hate” bumper sticker.

If I wore a t-shirt with a giant swastika on the front, I would almost certainly be confronted and called any number of names by passers-by on the street, despite the fact that the swastika predates the Nazi party my many thousand years. Even having the arms of the swastika bent to the left, rather than the right, would most likely not reduce the tongue-lashing I would undoubtedly receive. Why? Because it’s an inflammatory symbol. So is the Confederate flag. It’s time to let it go.

Now. The Ten Commandments. Prominently displayed in, or in front of, a government building, implies that the institution holds to those precepts. But given the fact that the Ten Commandments comes from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, only Christians and Jews are represented by the symbolic placement. Every other religion is marginalized by this symbol. When (depending on your preferred numbering scheme) four or five of the Commandments dictate religious concerns, the decision to remove them from a state capitol seems to be a no-brainer. And let’s face it – the religious commandments aren’t even enforced by our legal system. They simply don’t belong.

If you, personally, believe in and abide by the Ten Commandments, great! More power to you. I don’t think you should shake your fists and throw a tantrum because not everyone agrees with you. Your religious freedoms are not being taken away from you. The state just isn’t marginalizing its other citizens to make you feel more in control.

I think it’s high time that we dial down the rhetoric several hundred notches. Just as no one is implying that removing the Confederate flag is a magic bullet to end racism once-and-for-all, no one is saying that you can’t go to church anymore because a statue of the Ten Commandments no longer sits on the steps of the capitol building. It’s time to acknowledge that symbols have power and meaning, and that here in America – a country built on the inclusion of all – we should take care not to allow our symbols to hurt, intimidate, or marginalize our fellow Americans.

No News is Good News

Sorry I’ve haven’t written in so long. I haven’t had a lot to say. Now something’s really bumming me out and I want to talk about it for a bit. 


I’ve noticed a growing trend on my social media feed, and I have some thoughts regarding the inverse relationship between people’s overall apparent happiness and how much they follow the news.


I “follow the news”. That is, I peruse a couple of news sites more-or-less daily, keeping an eye on the state of the world, but not investing a lot of myself into it. You might say that I get my news from the headlines. I don’t watch the news on TV.


I have friends and family who spend a LOT of time watching, reading, and listening to the news. If they are stationary, they are tuned into some news outlet. Their posts online are links to news, political, or religious articles. I’ve noticed that these people seem generally unhappier than other people that I associate with.


Admittedly, this is nowhere near being a scientific study and is purely anecdotal. I am making this connection because I used to be something of a political/news junkie myself. During that time, I was mostly miserable to be around. I spent a lot of time ingesting media that actually made me angry. Then, I’d walk around, grumbling, shaking my tiny fists at the sky, furious about all of these decisions that were being made that I MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT AGREE WITH!!!!!! GRRR!!!!!!!!! (Completely unnecessary exclamation points added for effect).


In some moment of clarity, I realized that 99.9(repeating)% of the things that I was SO angry about, truly had an infinitesimal ACTUAL effect on my life. Policies made by the fat old men in expensive suits didn’t change my home life one bit. The world, as they say, kept turning. I made the conscious decision to stop following politics. Almost overnight, I felt my blood pressure lowering, and my empathy toward my fellow man (even those of a *GASP* different political affiliation) growing. It stands as one of my better lifestyle choices.


Now, I keep seeing people that I really care about – people that I love – who are just really, really angry a lot of the time, and it’s always something from the news that they’re angry about. If you stop to think about it for a second, the “news” isn’t very new at all. It is pretty predictable. I’ve got tomorrow’s headlines all lined up for you:


1. The Middle East is a mess and, for the most part, all of them hate America. I’m trying to think of a time when this wasn’t true, and I’m coming up blank.


2. People from the political party (or parties) that you don’t belong to say things and make choices that you don’t agree with.


3.People from the political party that you align yourself with say things and make choices that you agree with.


In fact, items 2 and 3 make item 1 mostly redundant, but I think that it’s valid enough to leave in there. I contend that, if we can just take these as a given, we really don’t need to follow much of the stuff that’s in the news.


The last couple of times I’ve been somewhere where the news was playing (waiting rooms, etc.), the entire program consisted of talking head after talking head, repeating the same things over and over and over. I don’t understand how anyone can watch broadcast news coverage. It’s painfully obvious that they have nothing to say or to add to the equation, so they just say the same things on repeat, occasionally bringing out a new talking head to say the same thing again. Then, the host repeats everything the talking head just said back to them. Helpfully, there’s also a little scroll underneath to repeat it again, just in case you missed it.


Now, to the news junkie in my life: try to think of a time when ingesting the news has made you happy. Has there been a time when you truly felt better by reading the news? Has there been a time when talk radio made you happier with your life? Do any of these things happen consistently? I suspect not.


My suggestion is to take a step away from the news channels. Watch something else on TV. Read a fiction novel. Go for a walk. Whatever. Think of something that really does make you happy and do that thing instead. Then, when you post online, talk about THAT. Write a post about your passions and how good they make you feel. When you strike up a conversation, talk about what’s going right in your life. In your town. In the world.


Please, just stop adding to the negativity. There’s enough of that already. You know. You’ve seen it on the news.