My Smile Politely column is up: The Air We Breathe.
It's about last week's entertainment choices, which taught me that white men used to be real jerks, cads, and bigots.
But actually, I decided that was the wrong lesson to learn.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The Smoke of Culture
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4 comments:
Destruction of the nuclear family. Guilty. Wholesale slaughter of millions of the next generation. Guilty. Refusal to admit good and evil exisst. Guilty. But I agree with you Dan, the next generations who figure these things out shouldn't judge us too hard. People got blinded by the smoke in the air of their culture.
"There's a temptation for us to feel self-righteous, but let's face it, the vast majority of us would have acted the same way under the same circumstances."
I'm both pleased and slightly surprised you said this. It is the kind of thing only a sober, thoughtful person would say.
;-)
All of my attempts at wrenching your perspective away from "party-line thinking" must have had an effect. That, or you're just not as partisan as I once thought.
Bless you...and good article.
I think it sucks, I miss that drunken thoughtless partisan wining you are always so predictable for Dan. :-(
OK, self-righteousness is not warranted. However, that was some evil shit going on and if they had ever actually paid any attention to the religious teachings they professed to believe in, anyself reflective second grader would have said, "Whoa Nellie, this is some evil shit, and we are godless hypocrites!"
And there were plenty of people who felt exactly that way or it never would have changed. I would venture to say that the majority of people did not believe in slavery, lynchings, genocide, witch burning and on and on. But people in power did, either because there was a lot of money to be made or because keeping poor people of different ethnicities at each other's throats is a damned effective way to keep the masses from rising up and demanding justice.
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