I'd be the first to admit I don't really understand economics. Money, as an idea, baffles me completely. But the notion of a narrow circle made up of mostly male, Type-A personalities holding onto most of the green stuff via bonuses and kickbacks simply by being cutthroat enough to slash employees' wages and cut product quality is, to be honest, rather buggeringly irritating. "Profits", i.e. the maximum share of a company's earnings that can be diverted to fill the CEO's and a handful of wealthy investors' offshore accounts, is more important than the working conditions and remuneration of the workers. Not to mention (though of course, I will) the impact that the mass production of almost any item has on the natural environment from which the company extracts its necessary materials. And wrapped up in this big sticky mess called "economics" is the serpentine whisperings of that entity known as "advertising", playing on people's innate tendency for social comparison and their intrinsic desire to be esteemed, wanted, admired, respected.
That being said, even if it weren't for the overtones of economic parasitism and fabricated elitism that seems to be a core tenet of most if not all of the Republican presidential nominees, I'd still be more strongly motivated to oppose them at any cost for the sake of far more clear-cut issues, such as legalizing same-sex marriage and preventing school bullying. I can plead ignorance of how finances and capitalism work, but when it comes to two consenting adults' rights to love and marry regardless of their sex/gender, I have no such qualms. The same goes for bullying: it's not just "a phase" or "a part of childhood" (for one, bullying often continues past high school), but rather, it is just plain wrong. Sick, twisted, disgusting, and evil. Natural? One could make that argument, but I say to that: a lot of things could be construed as "natural" (like shitting on someone's manicured lawn, say, or inter-ethnic violence), but that doesn't mean they should all be condoned. "Natural", or even "normal" (that favorite word of pop psychologists) does not necessarily equal make something right or unchangeable. We're only human, sure, but we can at least try to be better than simply acting out on every violent, rude, selfish, anti-social, impulsive urge we get from our Australopithecine ancestors.
Oh, but what about being gay? I hear some imaginary Baptist yelling from the back of the pack. Why, yes, it's true, part of my argument for tolerating gay marriage and lifestyles is that it is perfectly natural; every other primate species commonly shows, at the very least, bisexual behavior, and many more species afford examples of purely homosexual unions (look it up!). So, yes, homosexuality is a natural occurrence--but the difference between it and bullying is that the latter is undeniably and inexcusably harmful, while the other is not.The reason I stress homosexuality's "natural" origins is because of all the rhetoric, going back millennia, about it being "unnatural", "unhealthy", "abominable", "perverted". But it's none of those things, whereas bullying (as "natural" as it may be, springing from our innate primate competitiveness and desire for dominance) is both abominable and unhealthy. Our human nature has given us a lot to work with and work around--like our unfortunate innate drive to bully and tease and ostracize unlucky peers--but homosexuality is not one of them, and certainly not the demonic corruption some die-hard Bible-thumpers would have us believe.
Of course, nothing I say here is likely to change the way most committed social conservatives view gay marriage. They're "believers", they're "faithful", they shun the idea of "change". For four thousand years or more, the majority of our species has looked backward instead of forward, holding onto concepts and superstitions that, while we now understand where and how they may have arisen, no longer serve any function, and are in fact holding us back from achieving an unheard-of social unity. They've drawn a line in the sand and vowed to never cross it, even as the ground gives way beneath them. What exactly are they accomplishing?
No comments:
Post a Comment