I teach the future, and quite frankly I'm terrified. The following is just one example of how enforcing morality can be lethal to this great nation. Born and raised in PA I had to move to a red state when I graduated from Seton Hill, there just weren’t any jobs in the north for my husband and I (history teachers are a dime a dozen these days). I enjoy my job and life in a small impoverished rural county of Virginia. I have the most glamorous job in the school, I am the band director. As I continue to post I will fill you in on pertinent information about my perspective. The objective of this posting is to fill you in on what our children are saying when their parents aren’t around to correct them. Edwin Gordon, a prominent music educator and researcher, discovered that children develop their attitudes from imitating their parents starting at birth. My major concern is that many of the children that I teach are getting mixed signals from their parents. The mixed message that concerns me the most is this: The bible tells us to love everyone, but that doesn’t include gays and non-Christians.
The day before the election I overheard students in my guitar class talking about some of the issues. I sat down beside a few of them to hear where they stood. One group of students had adamantly and openly supported John Kerry by speaking about the atrocities that Bush had committed and by wearing campaign buttons. They also own T-Shirts (that they still wear) that have a picture of Bush and the words “Not My President” on them. The other group of students are the typical church goers of the south, three out of the four of them still think that the Civil War never ended and the “south will rise again”, whatever that means.
Both groups were bantering back and forth about various issues such as the war in Iraq, the economy, education, etc… until one Kerry supporter (one of my favorite students) said “Well what about gay people, you know, if they take away the rights of gay people then who’s to say that they won’t start to take our rights away too.” One of the Bush supporters replied “It doesn’t matter because gays aren’t human so they don’t deserve rights.”
Two days later a Bush supporting student called another student (the second student being Hindu) a “stupid A-RAB.” He said this in a derogatory tone, which I can not even begin to mimic in speech let alone express in written text. He said that those type of people shouldn’t be allowed in the county because they are a threat. I was angry and sick on so many levels. First of all the student that he was referring to was indeed Hindu, not Muslim. He didn’t even know what nationality he was making a derogatory slur toward! Second of all, my college education helped me to understand that the terrorists are a select group of people and that not all Muslims are anti-American, nor are all Muslims terrorists, let alone this intelligent Hindu boy that the Bush supporter was referring to.
It hit me then and there that although the conservatives in the country feel strongly about morality they are indirectly brewing hatred, and I don’t know of one Christian that would argue that hatred is moral.
With this being said I think that the Democrats (especially the Christian Democrats that are tired of being called immoral) need to get to the root of Christianity, Jesus taught us to love one another, and that God is the one and only judge. And for the other citizens in American that are not Christian (yeah, they exist, non-Christians in our country, imagine that) the Dems have to put across a message of tolerance. It is sad that a country that was founded on tolerance of differences now considers a tolerant person immoral. I believe that there are more people in this county that love one another and accept others than there are people who hate and want to persecute, but I’m still young and could be having a naïve moment…let’s hope not.