The Weather and Everyone's Health

Monday, June 12, 2006

Well, there he goes again! Seriously, I think he has some good ideas, but could use an editor. Also, I wonder whether he passes any of his ideas to political strategists who could actually try to implement them. Anyway, I need to point out that this is a spiritual, not political message because I'm at work (on my lunch break) and because of the non-profit status of the organization none of its resources (such as my computer) can legally be used for political purposes.

“We realize that many Americans are legitimately concerned about the increase in selfishness, looking out for number one, materialism and extreme individualism that make it hard for people to sustain loving relationships. When people are only looking out for number one, families lose their sense of shared purpose and many people feel scared that the family, the only institution in our whole society that has the official goal of providing you with safety and security, is actually collapsing around us. Those fears are legitimate—but they are not caused by gays and lesbians who themselves are wanting to build strong families and would do so if the laws gave them the right to marry and build lasting families. People learn the selfishness and materialism because the work all day in an economy, often in huge corporations, that teach them that the “real world” is governed by a Bottom Line of money and power, and that your worth in the world depends on how much you can show your boss that directly or indirectly you will contribute to this materialistic bottom line.

“Do this year after year, learning to see others primarily in terms of how they can be of use for you so that you can maximize your own well-being, and no wonder that people come home each day believing that what is rational is just to look out for number one. And that makes love and commitment very difficult to sustain. So if we want strong families, we are not going to get them by attacking gays and lesbians or denying them the right to families—in fact, we’re all better off when they themselves want families instead of staying in the marketplace of relationships and playing around. We should want them to have families, just as we want our heterosexual friends to have the benefits of families.

“But to sustain families, we need something totally different: we need A New Bottom Line in America so that institutions and corporations and government practices and laws get judged to be efficient and productive and rational not just because they maximize money or power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity. Lets build a society that encourages us to see every other person as an embodiment of the sacred, and encourages us to respond to the grandeur of the universe with awe, gratitude and radical amazement.

The above gets a little heady, but I thought this paragraph was very good, though:
When people are in pain because they feel that love and safety are disappearing, they are easy prey to right-wing fanatics. We need to help them by providing a different way for them to understand why their families feel so insecure and why cynicism has become so prevalent that even talking about love seems silly and adolescent. When we’ve done that explaining, we are far more likely to win the battles for equal rights in the future.

- posted by k @ 12:57 PM