I believe we are mostly sane people, and while half of human beings are below average in wisdom or intelligence, we are on the whole not utterly stupid or foolish.
The people who need to grab headlines in order to have a job perpetuate stupidity. People have to make a living, and I should be more sympathetic, but I'm not. Yet - I am at least a little sympathetic. Guy's gotta eat. Still, they risk being shot down and banished to the outer darkness, and they knew the job was dangerous when they took it.
It seems we can't have a sane discussion anymore, but I would like to pretend, at least for a moment. I think there are some starting points.
A) CoVid19 is a bad thing and kills people
B) There are other medical risks in the world
C) Economic and social consequences can sometimes be a bad thing as well.
A) There is racism in America
B) Racism is a bad thing
C) There are other bad things in the world, too.
D) There is less racism than there was 30/50/100 years ago.
If you can't sign on to these things, I don't know how we are going to have a conversation
7 comments:
The CoVid virus is neither good nor bad: it is simply a life-form going about its lawful occasions. Like CoVid, racism is morally neutral: it exists wherever Homo sapiens and other social species are to be found; it is a natural response to degrees of genetic distance between groups. As moral beings we should consider expressions of racism in bad taste, to be curbed by the application of good manners. Like the poor, viruses and racism will always be with us – until our extinction.
100 sure. 50 almost certainly. But 30 years ago was 1990. I'm not at all confident race relations have improved since then.
Hmm. Could be so. I was just throwing out numbers and should have thought harder.
I'm wondering what the metric is for determining how much racism remains? How will we know when it's done? Will it be when all the people who benefit by perpetuating the perception of racism stop shouting?
That would be an unfortunate standard to aim toward.
Whose racism?
"You knew the job was dangerous when you took it" is something you SHOULD have on a T-shirt. Or replace the "you" with 'I".
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