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| This is Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes.They're hippies |
BY: Corey Keyser
I am a very liberal
person, and not “Tennessee” liberal. I am talking “San Francisco” liberal. And
it is not because I am some hippy or something(although that does sound fun). I
just don’t care how other people live to make themselves happy and I would just
rather see a world with more equality.
Honestly, I would
just rather listen to some Edward Sharpe or Beatles and just be content with
the world around me. But I gotta tell you, people are big freaking fans in
telling others how to live their life. Whether it is the LGBT community,
interracial families,immigrants,minorities, or just plain people who use
contraception, there is always some chauvinistic, insensitive arse that feels
the need to hold up signs and act angry (Ya I am looking at you Westboro Baptist
Church).
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| These horrible people are the members of Westboro Baptist church and then that guy in the middle. |
Anyway...my theory
is that people are just evolutionarily adapted to being selfish and mean. I can
see how Olaf, the caveman, making fun of Umku’s, also Caveman, huge elbow growth
could cause Umku’s girlfriend to “go with” Olaf so he can pass along his
selfish seed for future generations. So evolutionarily it kindaish makes sense,
but come on we live in a world of abundance where 87% of the population has
enough food to eat and a warm place to lie their head at night(global health
facts 1). Do we really need to be selfish and exclude others to get above
everyone else,thus fullfilling our evolutionary destiny? No we don’t, but
people still do.
The most annoying
part about the struggle for civil rights (lgbt,immigrants, interracial couples,
etc.) is that the government actually decides major parts of these issues. In
our country alone we have had laws on sodomy and laws on racial segregation, as
well as laws banning gay marriage(ferris “jim crow”, theweek “sodomy laws”). Is
it really our governments business to set such guidelines on the way we live?
The fact that a lot of the arguments against gay marriage are religiously based
is also kind of hard to comprehend since we are a secular country, but you
know...the struggle.
The Good thing is,
it could be a lot worse. At least there is pretty much no KKK influence, or
race riots in the South all the time, but the fact that homosexual and
multiracial couples are still considered taboo in most places shows us that we
still don’t have real equality. Most people instead believe in, “Your group
doesn’t "you know" with our group, but hey you can still drink from
the same water fountain.”
Coitus, or “you
know”,(apparently can’t use the s-e-x-word in school)still just makes a
lot of people very uncomfortable. Until we give the people equality in the bed
without having to consult congress on the matter; we don’t have real equality!!
Come on, are we really the land of the free and the home of the brave or just a
country of sheep and conformists to the conservative white ideal(Maher 2)?
Anyway in Barabara
Kingsolver’s book The Poisonwood Bible we get to encounter a brave and
pretty cool interracial couple, Leah and Anatole. Except they are married in
the late 50’s Congo and then they get to live in the always “super tolerant”
Georgia. Wherever they go they are met with animosity. And not just the couple
together, but both of them of them apart are seen as unnatural freaks. Leah’s
old family and friends will not accept her, and Anatole’s political power is
undermined by his taboo of marrying into another race(Kingsolver 273). Even
today, where we live in a place with “civil rights” and “equality for all men”,
the idea of people doing something out of the norm of the heterosexual suburban
couple is still not fully accepted; I can’t even imagine how bad it was in the
50s and 60s.
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Naturally people
might ask, “Should Leah and Anatole have done what they did?” Anatole could
have become the Nelson Mandela or Che Guevara of the Congo; if only he just
chose a nice african girl who the public could accept. Bright little Leah could
have gone back to America and became a hippy. She could have gone to Woodstock!
Man she was really missing out ...Just kidding, but in all seriousness she
could have become a doctor with Adah. Thankfully for us,the readers, they stood
up against Society and did it their own way. They needed each other and they
were happy together. And as cliche as it sounds “all they needed was love”(
Lennon 3).
Plus it
also really helped the story: everyone loves a challenged Romance that society
says is wrong...Romeo and Juliet.
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