From the BlogSubscribe Now

Love, No Matter What – Wonderful TED Talk by Andrew Solomon

This is a beautifully delivered message from author Andrew Solomon. Like him, I’d like to see everyone treated fairly, the same, without respect to how different the majority might deem them to be. When we discriminate against people because of their race, sex, age or sexual orientation, we are actually stunting the growth of our society. Great people are marginalized, left to wonder where they fit into a world that thinks they’re too different. Are such people even allowed to contribute everything they have to offer to society? When the answer is no, I just think that’s crazy.

Besides the many wars we’ll likely continue to be engaged in (the ones where we use UAVs and tanks and soldiers), I believe this is the greatest fight we as a species have before us.

We Used To

We used to sacrifice humans to appease the gods.
We used to think the Earth was flat.
We used to have witch hunts and we’d burn the ones we caught.
We used to practice bloodletting, extracting tiny quantities of blood from a patient in order to cure disease.
We used to often lobotomize crazy people, and shock them with electricity too.
We used to enslave Africans.
We used to take some of those slaves as concubines.
We used to allow children to work long hours in factories.
We used to prevent women from voting.
We used to involuntarily sterilize people for eugenic purposes.
We used to have teachers that would hit the backsides of unruly students with rulers.
We used to throw people in internment camps.
We used to tell consumers smoking was cool.
We used to make black people drink out of a different drinking fountain and give up their bus seats to white people.
We used to ban interracial marriage.
We used to do all of these things, and more.

Why don’t we do these things anymore? Why not?
Why were these things so right, until they were wrong?
Does the human race just get progressively smarter as it moves along?
We thought we were just in our beliefs, and some kicked and screamed as these practices were changed or abolished.

What are we doing today to marginalize our fellow human being?