Seems like those Presidential candidates don’t have a clue! Like all they want is to get elected. They don’t seem to care about injustices caused by our broken penal and immigration systems. It’s okay to try kids as adults, then throw them into adult prisons to harden and learn new criminal skills. Homeless, elderly, disabled people–all that matters is money and power, not lives and human dignity. If an issue strikes a moral chord with us, we should exert our influence. Now is the time to contact those candidates, letting them know what’s important to us and what they need to address if they want our vote. Remember, too, that they read newspapers, so write a letter to the editor. And social media, so post there. If you get a positive response, encourage others to express their opinions. If a candidate won’t listen, give your vote to someone who will.
Tag Archive for dignity
Good Fun?
If you don’t laugh, the jokester will shake his head at you and say, “Come on. It’s all in good fun.” Yet. the ethnic joke he’s told makes you cringe. That’s your conscience responding to an attack on the human family. At that moment, you are inwardly aware that someone’s dignity is being attacked. Deep inside we know that such put-downs only feed bad feelings or stereotypes, keeping them alive. They are hurtful rather than healing in our world.
A step toward protecting human dignity is to stop tolerating those insults. There are two rules in doing this: 1) use a response that is natural and comfortable for you, and 2) make your point but don’t humiliate the person you’re speaking to. For example, you might say, “That joke makes you sound prejudiced, and I know that can’t be true.” Or, “My brother-in-law is Irish and he’s not a drunk.” Sometimes people’s attention just needs to be drawn to what they are actually saying.
The Family Budget as a Weapon
Here, in the middle of the year, many of us are reviewing our family budget to make sure we’re okay until January. This is a good time to take a close look, to see if our spending habits reflect what we say we believe. For example, I believe in human dignity, so shouldn’t I stop buying at that huge discount chain that has been in the news often for mistreating and intimidating their non-documented immigrant employees? I respect how hard local farmers work, so why not buy at farmers’ markets and through co-ops? I may have to pay a little more. But I can save money (and the environment) by walking or car-pooling sometimes. Or by exchanging one night out a month for a family-centered game-night in. I need to make my priorities clear to myself and to the stores and corporations I buy from. They notice how we spend our money. That makes our family budget a potential weapon of mass instruction!