Good Morning.
After my Friday rant against people who insist on indulging their champagne taste on a beer budget, one of my subscribers suggested that maybe we were turning into a couple of old curmudgeons. I don't know about her but she has a point about me. I've grumped around about all kinds of stuff for sixteen months. I've complained about TV shows like The Bachelor/ette where a hunter or huntress fools around with a dozen partners in the time in takes to get an oil change and Family Feud that dishes out questions designed to return adults to a seven-year-old bathroom humor mentality. I've carried on about rude drivers, airline service, and junk mail. I've also gone after the president for his terrible need to degrade other human beings, including his political opponents, the apparently limitless number of women he fancies, and entire groups of people he doesn't want coming to the United States. His election was the final straw in a lifelong series of events that has turned me into a doddering old crosspatch.
I believe in a creator God who doesn't make mistakes, i.e. the people he turns out on Tuesday are just as good as the ones who get born on Wednesday, a message that was driven home very early in my life by a father who pulled up to the bus stop in crummy weather to pick up total strangers and give them a ride wherever they wanted to go. He didn't give a flipping damn whether they were black, white, gay, straight, Jewish, Buddhist, fat, thin, rich or poor. My dad's attitude was in marked and deeply painful contrast to that of the nuns at St. Joseph Cathedral who told me every Saturday morning that this man who chauffeured an assortment of grateful human beings around town was going to hell because he wasn't Catholic, and after years and years of distress and conflict, his unusual example became my preferred catechism. I'm offended by anyone who beats up on people because they're a different something, and I don't care if the determination to exclude and intimidate is mouthed by a snob at a country club, a redneck in a beer joint, or a pastor in a pulpit. I've seen and heard all of it, believe me. I grew up with quotas in private schools, restricted neighborhoods, and a preoccupation with family pedigrees. I lived in the Deep South during the Civil Rights movement when the Ku Klux Klan got together in a church basement before lynching someone from the nearest tree. I currently reside in a part of the country where it has been difficult to go out for lunch, to a dinner party, or even to a church social event without being subjected to very unfortunate commentary, and I'm tired of it. I absolutely believe that we're not supposed to sort people off like cattle, and it should have nothing to do with how we govern, i.e. how we raise revenue, how we deliver health care, or how we protect the country. It's supposed to be about whether we regard some human beings as inferior and regrettable or all of us as equal and valuable.
The old bag also believes that such a delightful palette of humanity shouldn't be bogging itself down by obsessing about granite countertops or by watching a woman cavort on a tropical island with a bunch of panting cavemen. We can do better stuff with the brains God gave us.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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