These following thoughts were spurred by the words written to me by a friend who visited blame for destruction and theft of private property on a group of people not because of the choices they made, but because of an accident of birth...No other identification of this friend will be made here...
I kid and poke fun at a lot of people and ideologues when they involve the choices people make which govern their lives...In my mind, people choose which gender attracts them sexually; they choose whether and which religion to follow; they even choose how to vote for government leadership, and they choose what to ingest in their bodies regardless of the consequences...The paths they follow as results of those choices are of their own volition, and they have the further choice of reversing course and renouncing the choices which harm themselves and others...
Two things I choose not to use for scorn or the purpose of humiliation are race and physical abnormalities...Neither were asked for, yet the consequences of both are something each individual is left to deal with over the course of a lifetime...None of us chose to be born of a particular skin color nor of the ability to move about under our own power, and yet we did choose to live and vote responsibly accepting the results of our choices, to earn our own living without harming others and to allow others the same opportunities...Or not...When the choice is made to take what seems to be an easier path to happiness, however temporary, then we must accept the consequences without falling back on the empty defense of being guiltless because of being born with less-than-popular physical characteristics...
I scorn those who wreck their own lives and the lives of others with drugs, crime and violence...I do not scorn them because they are not of the same race as I am since an accident of birth did not cause their actions; their own choices did that...I am not angry at my friend, merely disappointed...We also have the choice of recognizing our own errors and correcting the course of our lives...It's now been more than 50 years since I described anyone using the epithet now known as the "n-word"...It was slapped out of me by a friend who heard me use it to describe our mutual friend...I've always been grateful for the accidental timing which allowed that slapping to occur by someone who had my best interests in mind, and not someone who might have carried those actions further...
There is such a thing as slapping some sense into a person...
