Last week, I tried to explain as best I could what I felt could be part of a solid, sound, moral, ethical and spiritual basis to rely upon in fighting for social justice. To be a witness rather than a bystander when confronting man’s inhumanity to man. In that essay, Journey to the Core of the Human Spirit, I tried to be as substantive as I could about an aspect of ourselves that is in so many ways intangible and open to misinterpretation.
This essay will be about an even more seemingly intangible phenomenon.
It’s all well and good to have an ethical and spiritual foundation in order to fight for social justice.
But as in all dangerous and difficult quests, once you set out, obstacles appear.
My latest obstacle is not a huge one, but it is extremely irritating!
When I enter and comment in diaries about immigration (yes, over at the Great Orange Satan, but it could be anywhere among Democrats), I have found a new meme floating around. It goes something like this:
“Yeah, and if you don’t agree 100% with them then they call you a racist or a xenophobe!”
There are hundreds of variations on this tired theme. One of the most annoying (though, in retrospect, funny if it weren’t so sad) new variations I encountered was when someone said that calling a person a racist is using the “biggest beat stick” be it secular or religious and thus implying this was akin to both hate speech and, perhaps, causing someone to lose their life in a fiery explosion from hell.
So I have tried to come up with an answer to that meme, to overcome this obstacle to real dialogue.