Posted by pancho from pool0276.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.251.21) on Sunday, September 08, 2002 at 3:07PM :
I don't believe in Evil...or Goodness. Not as things that exist outside of people...as a disease or a state of grace that afflicts some people...We're all capable of eberything...no one has a monopoly on vice or virtue.
You'd think being from the MidEast we would understand at a gut level how wrong discrimination based on religion or ethnicity is. I can understand the person bron in Racine or Oshkosh and never leaving his or her own state, can believe that foreigners can be strange, completely different beings who share none of our own feelings towards family and children...that they are so completely exotic you don't have to think of them as capable of the same feelings and passions and desries as you have.
But we come from another place...we've seen other parts of the world...we've been the objects of discrimination and violence ourselves...did we learn nothing? Was what we suffered only wrong because it was done to us? Now that we have the opportunity, should we become opressors ourselves? Are we now going to hate people who hated us...to show that it was wrong to hate us? And that we can be just as hateful?
I know what it's like to be beaten for my religion...or ethnicity...and then for my nationality. I know what the person feels whom I decide to beat for those same things I hated...why would I want to DO it myself now?
-- pancho
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