I wonder if it doesn't start in our families. I have a lot of successful
relatives who have made it through hard work and connections with
the fundamentalist Christian groups. They are convinced that
large
sectors of the world are evil and find no problem with doing evil to
them.
On the other hand they are family. Do I make myself anymore of
an
outsider than I am already by challenging the hatred against Gays and
others. Or by their cataloguing anyone who believes that abortion
is
a family issue, that must be decided sensitively for the living,
as a murderer.
All the while supporting polluting industries and anyone who practices
population
control through mechanical means as being against their god's population
policy. Or that teaching their children that the world
is older than 10,000
years, even though they made their fortune in the pursuit of geological
wealth, is also a sin against their god or that those who teach
sexuality as
a need are also against their god even while they eat themselves to
death
and get prostate cancer from too little pleasurable activities while
the
women gets cancer from too much after menopause. So when
you
talk to them about David and Bathsheba or Leonard Bernstein or scattering
one's seed, where do you draw the line? It is certain
that there is little
prostate cancer within the rape and pillage community, even if we are
talking about the market, as long as it isn't metaphor. But is
it right?
No, but neither is dying from cancer. Perhaps there is
a third way?
When does it mean that choosing life means one leaves one's family,
community or the religion of their recent family?
Because not to do
so means to choose one's untimely demise?
So how does this relate to bureaucracy? And the choices
that one makes
while working within one? I don't know, I have chosen not to
work within one
all of my life and have paid for it but have been free to choose my
own creative
path. It is much harder for me with family because I love
them and am
tied to them by springs deep within my soul. But
they are wrong, as wrong
as they believe me to be. I have learned simply by
getting older, of the
foolishness of their ways. Come on in the water's fine.
REH
"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COME" wrote:
Yup. I tell my colleagues that the most profound
form of censorship in our
workplace is self-censorship. One reply I get, though, is that
the only
faultless move a bureaucrat can make is to do nothing!!
Arthur Cordell
--
From: Timework Web
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Blaming the victors
Date: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 1:39PM
The scum is in ourselves, not in our stars, methinks. It would be much
easier to "do something" about the injustice in the world than most
of us
admit, either to ourselves or to others. It seems to me that the
self-censorship I encounter in people at the middle levels is far in
excess of what people need for their personal and career survival.
I can
only understand it as a defense against getting so committed that they
would then overstep the actual taboos. And I'm talking about
self-censorship from people who are self-identified as political
progressives.
Tom Walker
