common values

COMMON VALUES II 06/20/2006



Life is this game of connect the dots, if you fail to connect all the dots you don't see the whole picture.

June 6, 2006 was an election day in Alabama, it was also the 62nd anniversary of the D-Day, the memorial of the day when the United States Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from the clutches of the Nazis and the Facsists. No one cared that the black soldiers and the white soldiers were in seperate units. Or that back home the blacks could not vote or even drink from the same water fountain. Ofcourse freedom for the blacks was not all that important, being that they were not really humans like "US". So it was that while the blacks gave their lives to free the white Europeans, back home we lynched the blacks for looking at a white woman, it was also one of our common values.

In !979, I was assigned to Fort Rucker. One of my black friends ( an E-6, MP) could not leave Fort Rucker with his girl friend because she was white. Back in those days you just did not do that in Alabama. Then the 1980 lynching of a black kid in Mobile once again put the fear of God in "THOSE" people. Blacks in the banks were janitors not cashiers or investment advisors, they were kept in their place. It took my annonymous letter to a local credit union to see some black cashiers, in 1990.

It is then ironic that on the day that we celebrated the liberation of Europe, that 81percent of my fellow citizens of Alabama would decide to deny a common previledge to the adult homosexuals of this state that was granted hetrosexual fourteen year olds just a few short years ago. Since when do the common values have to over come the common senses? Taliban had tried to impose common values on the society, but here we mostly belong to the churches that are based on a faith that it self was created against the common values of a tradition, did we not update the old testament into the new testament? Have we, as a society never changed our own norms? If one has the right to be with his OWN kind then since when he should have the right to stop another from doing the same.

I am personally ofended at the public display of the so called gay pride, or public displays of gay affection, but then I am also personally offended by the public display of too much skin, hetrosexual making out in public, and school kids rubbing all over eachother, but what can I say. I would not dare stop your daughter from doing the same or you might be offended by my interposing in her private life too.

The era of irrational exubrance is still with us, and flaunting is not just a gay problem. We fluant our degrees, our politics and our connections, we flaunt our bodies, and in the wiregrass where the TV announceseach night that 38,000 citizens are in danger of going to bed hungry, we buy $450,000 condos and build $20 million mansions, the flaunting of our common values may not be so far off the mark, it may just be to atone for our other shortfalls.


It is probabaly almost impossible that majority of the white couples in Alabama could end up with a black child (naturally), or vice versa, but it is surely possible that one of yours, or mine, children or grand children could end up being gay, would you or I then shoot them, or would we like them to have a`decent life all the same, to have and to find love, and a chance to be afforded the same dignity, fairness and honor that we want for our dogs and cats and may be even for our other kids.

May be today is a good day, for all of us, to start working for that goal.

(M.N.R)