Hatred is Hatred:
I cannot say that I agree completely with Maddow, but I can certainly see that America is coming from a very flawed place these days.
There was a time when American values were inclusionary; we overcame the prejudices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to become that famous "melting pot" writers used to speak of. It certainly was not perfect; racism was not only rampant, it was in many places codified into law. And of course, gay rights were unheard-of.
But still, we - as a nation and a people - tried. The Armed Forces began desegregation efforts in the 1940s. A Civil Rights Act guaranteeing equality to racial minorities was passed in 1964. Even the efforts of gay pioneers like Frank Kameny were met with due process along with the hostility (Kameny has suffered long and much for his beliefs, but he has attained a ripe old age and lived to see his name honoured). I can easily remember churches - and synagogues - playing one another's softball teams. An interracial marriage - that of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz - was completely accepted and even held up as a model for America. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were bitter political enemies - and personal friends. Tolerance was our watchword, and if it was sometimes honoured more in the breach than in the observance, we still knew what tolerance was, and we knew that our best hope for the future was to strive for it.
Today, our nation and its people are a model of intolerance. The Republicans get elected and sweep away as much as possible of what Democrats have done. Democrats get elected and do the same thing. The rhetoric coming from both our major parties is crafted to polarise the electorate. We have put the civil rights of a significant minority of our population up to popular vote. We live in ghettos of our own making, living in neighbourhoods full of people just like us, watching cable channels that feed us exactly what we want to see and hear instead of challenging us with differing viewpoints, and permitting our politics to choose our friends, jobs and partners for us.
We have forgotten that we cannot ourselves be respected if we do not respect others. Anyone who votes to keep civil rights away from another person has weakened his own position in life, because the day and the circumstances may come when someone else will question whether he should be equal to others. Anyone who defames the politics of another will have to bear a return volley of equally vicious rhetoric. Anyone who condemns another religion has exposed his own as an emotional convenience or a social pastime, not genuine faith.
There is a reason the world is in so much trouble, and that reason is disrespect. For some unfathomable reason, it has become fashionable to believe that one's own viewpoint, nationality, politics and religion are all so correct or desirable that all others are deserving only of contempt. The "melting pot" has been abandoned; we sit in various residential, social and religious ghettos of our own making and we refuse to leave them to meet and know others outside them. The result is that Dems hate Repubs, Repubs hate Dems, Christians demonise Muslims, Muslims demonise Christians, and everybody wants immigration controlled, though the parametres of that control vary along with individual prejudices.
Until we get back to a societal ethic of inclusion instead of trying to decide who is the "right kind" of American, this nation has very little business exporting values to other countries. How can America effectively deplore the Taleban when people here have their rights struck down by religious fundamentalist organisations working our political system for all it's worth? How can we act horrified over "ethnic cleansing" in other countries when the urban sprawl of our own major cities is largely the result of "white flight"? How can we have a great nation when a banker and CEO class display absolute contempt for the rights and needs of our workers as they pursue their obscene bonuses?
My own estimation is that this nation has no more than a few years to turn its collective psyche around if it ever wants to reattain its status as the symbol of freedom it has traditionally represented abroad. Our reputation has taken a bad hit internationally; America is no longer spoken of abroad with the respect it once enjoyed in civilised nations. And we cannot cherry-pick what we will and won't respect, as we try to do now; the failed policies of the Bush administration have a lot to do with our loss of prestige abroad, but so does the fact that other countries have been able to pass marriage or civil partnerships for all their citizens, and our fundamentalist contingent here has seen to it that we have not - in what is supposed to be the land of the free.
Respect is the way, folks, and considering all the trouble we in now, this would be a very good time to begin giving it on our own, individual level, and demanding it from those higher on the food chain.
I'm off my soapbox. For the moment, anyway.
And for one last final thing, Rachael ROCKS!! and many thanks for her for putting unknown story on the air.
