Imagine if we all just said what we thought

begin quote:Katzooks: "Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing straight-talk that, when a man such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright speaks, it stuns and outrages our sensibilities. The audacity of this man to just say what he believes!end quote.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/
wright.reactions/index.html?

Like the title says: Imagine if we all just said what we thought. As much as possible here at this blog and on my other website I try to do just that.

I had a very strange experience the other day. I was listening to Rev. Wright speak at the NAACP and I thought my wife was going to get hysterical because she just couldn't stand what he was saying. I really couldn't understand why she was so upset. I finally, after 24 hours of wondering what all that was about am coming to the opinion that it has to do with class attitudes in America. My wife was raised upper middle class to rich. I was raised lower middle class to upper middle class. What I learned as a child growing up lower middle class was that ones survival depended upon listening to others points of view. Sometimes, if you didn't listen carefully to what people were telling you you just might wind up injured or dead. Because of this, I learned to listen carefully to anything someone was emotional about as a child. This was and is a very basic survival strategy. Because unless the person you are listening to is completely crazy, listening to them might save your life.

Another factor for me is that I was raised in a minority religion. In my 20s I felt and sometimes spoke of being an "invisible" minority because of the cult I was raised in. Though I dressed the popular styles of the day and could speak the local vernacular of wherever I lived, growing up my belief system was very different than most people in the 1950s because I believed in reincarnation, Jesus, Saint Germain, UFOs, and being a vegetarian. Now, it's no big deal if you have these beliefs but in the 1950s even in California you might be taking your life in your hands if you started talking this way to some people who were really sort of extreme into their own religious beliefs in those days. There simply was not the direct tolerance that is so much more alive and well at least in places like the California coast and College towns through much of the US that there is today. Freedom of religion has always been an ideal even though in the United States we still aren't completely there today. Yes. You can worship your own religion if you just don't talk about it or try to convert other people's children into your religion. That is the way it is today. In the 1950s the gap was much wider and people WERE killed for being different then.

Even when I grew up in High School I knew of people(Even in Los Angeles!) who went out on Friday or Saturday night with baseball bats to beat up or kill blacks or gays and this was 1963 to 1965. Though these people made me sick I knew enough in those days to keep my own counsel and to stay alive because these types actually did maim and kill people! They didn't just talk about it. Even then one could usually tell the difference in those days. These types usually didn't live long unless they joined a serious criminal gang anyway because they were usually just too dysfunctional to survive very long in normal society.

So when my wife started getting upset at what Rev. Wright was saying I couldn't understand why she didn't want to just hear his point of view. I listened as she said this kind of talk was racist and uneducated and generalized too much. I had a completely different take on it.

First of all, Rev. Wright has at least 3 degrees including a doctorate as well as several specialties including egyptology and linguistics. I was having a hard time getting to how one could be these educated and be a racist against whites. Most of the people I had met that were black and racists against whites didn't talk about it to white people. So I didn't agree with it because Rev. Wright was open about what he was saying and because he was saying these things in front of everyone. This for me, at least, took it out of the realm of being a racist against whites and into the realm of being an activist supporting blacks who was redressing injuries longstanding to his race.

For me, this is a very big distinction because it is the difference between a black man who works obediently for whites and then goes home and cusses them all out to his family and friends every night and someone who is actually trying to change things for his race and for that matter make things better for all races just like Martin Luther King did. However, the negative side of all this is that I'm afraid of the Black bashers that I saw as a teenagers and their reactions to all this. It makes me fear for Obama's and Rev. Wright life just as long ago people feared for Martin Luther King's life.

Saying what you think is a wonderful thing. However, if you say what you think publicly there might be those who wish to end your life. However, without some of us willing to say exactly what we think publicly then we all perish!