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And not those crappy little political lines crafted by speech writers who are too clever by half and hold is contempt and disdain the word wihout giving it its due.
What are our values?
Decency. And by that, I do not mean that narrow definition so sanctimoniously held by perfumed evangilists as they pass the electronic plate (Visa, Mastercard, AE, DISC, Diners Club accepted) but what we as a people mean when we judge and note that someone is a decent person. That judgement is reached because that person behaves decently which, in our operational definitions, might mean that when this person has the opportunity to do the honest, good, altruistic, and selfless thing, that is exactly what they do. Consistently. Some of us call them 'decent'. Some might call them 'a good guy'. You might call them cool or fly or whatever but we all know the kind of person I'm talking about.
No, not the Puritanical decency, the one that pretends that humans are not human, that what some of us think is more important than what others think. Real decency involves treating everyone with respect. It involves tolerating the foibles of others. It involves realizing that we are truly all in this together and that none of us deserve to be cast aside as inconvenient, difficult, or, that most evil of all phrases these bastard right-wingers sometime use, useless eaters.
Are you decent?
I bet you are. I am. And I am very pleased to be that way rather than the opposite.
Tolerance is another value we embrace. Or at least, I thought we did. The opposite, of course, is intolerance and in the up-is-down world these motherfuckers inhabit, intolerance is viewed as a virtue. Forget that he-who-is-without-sin-cast-the-first-stone bullshit. Throw the son of a bitch, hum that motherfucker regardless of the state of your soul.
These people make my head hurt! :crazy:
So far, we have decency and tolerance.
Let us discuss values. Let us not shy away from it. Our values are the values of most people. We just have to make them look at it factually.
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