I think I was the first person in my family of origin to become a flaming liberal (I have since sucked my dad to the dark side). Well, if being open to progress or reform (the true meaning of the word) means I'm liberal, I'm OK with that. Because I think we need it. Especially in politics and the church.
Most of the time, though, the liberal label gets attached to people who tend to think and question and, in many cases, are more educated. I have some extended family members who forward emails upholding Christianity in the political and social arenas. You've probably gotten them at some point...they deal with Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code and how Obama is a Muslim and the Republican party is right. Hell, maybe you've even pushed the Forward button on some of those. I stopped receiving such emails from these relatives when I responded to the one about the DaVinci Code, asking if they'd been able to read the book yet. But I digress.
The recent email centers on the fact that Obama and a few other senators (including Clinton) refused to sign the bill to make English the official language of the United States. Consequently, he is unpatriotic...and do we really want someone who sides with illegal immigrants to be the key leader of this country?
REALLY?!?!
English is already unofficially the official language in this country. All of our federal and state documents, all of our legal documents, are written in English. We don't do stuff in other languages when it has to go on the official books.
About the conclusions (?) drawn above about not signing the language bill, how do we logically get to that end? Has anyone who sent that really thought that through? In my mind, it makes us sound like pretentious, ethnocentric jackasses.
The bottom line here is that people forward crap to support a point or campaign that more than likely has very little validity. They either don't read all of it or they don't really think about what they are reading or sending. They take it at face value and think that it's right. While there may be a grain of truth to some of these messages, when you draw these things out to their logical conclusions, chances are the truth of the message is distorted beyond reason. Sometimes I think we need to revoke the privilege of using the Forward button on our email service.
And it's not limited to just emails. It's about any message any of us sends, be it over email, in the media, in a blog or from the pulpit. Are we paying attention to what we're saying? Are we paying attention to what's being said? Are we thinking through all of the implications of the message? You don't have to be liberal to do that. You just have to engage your brain.
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Well said. I think it's funny, in the book I'm listening to, "Atlas Shrugged", the ones who are the majority in the book (meaning the gov. and most of the unthinking/uncritical populace) are calling those that object the government's agenda "conservitive". The powerful people publicly label themselves "progressive" (i.e. "liberal"). To them in the 50's, it was the people who was not supporting the status quo who were derogatorily labeled "conservitive". It was looked down upon by the majority of Americans NOT to be progressive in one's thinking. My how things have changed.
I love being called a liberal. It is meant to be a derogatory label, but it wasn't meant to be so. If what makes me a liberal is the fact that I can think critically about my life, faith, and reality... then I wear it proudly. I wrote in my journal the other day on the use of words and how people throwing labels around like this eventually devalue their own agenda by the misrepresentation of the word. At what point did being "conservitive" become "good", and "liberal" "bad"? they are just categories of stances for the purpose of classification and definition. My, how we misuse words in the world of American English.
But their misuse of the label, "Liberal", because they present an "either/or" stance, and are pushing people away because they are better educated and WANT to critically think about their world, the derogatory label becomes a badge of honor in response, and accomplished the exact OPPOSITE of the labeler's intent!
great post!
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