Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll contemplates THE FRACTURED FAMILY OF MAN. She writes:

When I was in college, back in the quaint days when young men and women lived in separate residence halls, and not a single professor of Divisive Studies called for “muscle” to remove a student journalist from a public gathering, I bought a coffee-table book at a used bookstore.

The title of this book was The Family of Man and it was a beautiful picture book that demonstrated in photograph after photograph, our commonality and shared humanity. For example, there might be a picture of an American father bending down to correct some behavior of his small son, and on the opposite page there might be an African tribesman and his little boy with the exact same expressions on their faces.

There might be a picture of a beautiful Mexican couple clearly in love right next to a picture of an elderly Russian couple holding hands and adoring each other. “See?” each pairing seemed to say, “We are all just people, just part of the great human family. We laugh; we cry; we love; we fight; we make new babies; we grow old; we die.”

When we were parenting a couple of foster sons in the early ’90s, my Black/Hispanic son favored an expensive and colorful line of clothing with the motto “Love sees no color.” He wrote an essay in his ESL class for Mother’s Day in which he said, “My mother loves me as though she had held me in her arms on the day I was born.” Boo! Hiss! Obviously, a white-privileged woman cannot love a Black orphan from Honduras.

It absolutely breaks my heart to realize how far our society has descended from the sentiment that “love sees no color”. For the current arbiters of cultural norms assert that we have no common humanity. We are in a perpetual war of “each against all” except for the favored few in our own little tribe.

Today, we are supposed to see ONLY color, though those constructs are mostly lies. Bobby Jindal is a darker “color” than Halle Berry, but only one will be considered by the former head of the Justice Department, Eric Holder, to be a member of what he termed “my people.” Ah, Blind Justice! We should have renamed his fiefdom The Department of Just Us.

Next most important, apparently, is our genitalia, both God-given and manufactured, and then, with whom we choose to share access to same. Far from embracing our common humanity, the impetus now is to drive us into as many tiny competing tribes as possible.

Are you Jewish? Well, good on ya, but are you a Jewish woman? Then many synagogues will organize your own Women’s Seder apart from your Jewish brethren. I never have, even once, even when I was a loopy Democrat, attended. I had nothing to celebrate with women that I couldn’t celebrate with my fellow Jewish men. I doubt that is now separate enough for the amoeba-like splitters. Coming soon to an SJW synagogue near you: The Gay Black Spanish-Speaking, Transgendered Differently-Abled Women’s Seder! Enjoy. Both of you.

Tell me honestly, my friends: when you were marching for civil rights, equal housing, integration, did any of you believe there could come a day when saying “All lives matter” would get you booed and possibly beaten?

When you went out for tacos or Satay or General Tso’s Chicken in 1985, say, did you envision a future time when you would be berated for “cultural appropriation” for patronizing the ethnic eatery down the block? Groveling apologies and reeducation camps clearly in order.

I’m afraid I do despair of ever returning to the days of The Family of Man, setting aside, of course, the outrageous word “Man.” Just as I despair of returning to the days of good jobs, interest on my savings of 4%, stable marriages and raising children within the two-parent family. If you have any ideas on how to begin this process, please feel free to share.

I also believe that these things are much more important than which flawed, ego-driven, duplicitous politician wins in the November shell game. In 1964, all the smart people said that voting for Goldwater would ensnare us in a war which LBJ called a war “Asian boys should fight for themselves.” I was too young to vote, but I worked for Goldwater and sure enough, we got horribly involved in Vietnam! So, Vietnam was all my fault and I apologize.

Well, now I’m off to culturally appropriate some Thai food. As offensive as that is to Oberlin students, the hard-working proprietor at Thai Dressing always seems downright happy to see me. What does he know? He probably never even took Thai Studies.