Hi all it’s been awhile and as you’re reading this post you’re going to be saying to yourself “I thought this was a blog about gastric sleeve surgery and what goes on after it?” Well it is, but I just need a moment to talk about what’s been going on in our country lately. I was raised to not see color, shape, or size that everyone was equal. What’s been happening in our country is more than a little scary. It’s setting us back I don’t know how many years. It’s basically spitting in the faces of our parents and grandparents maybe even our great grandparents who fought for our freedom, protested for our rights, and have allowed us to live generally comfortable lives.
Many of our parents grew up with an unpopular war, corrupt presidents/politicians, protests and riots and now our children are growing up with it. I don’t have children at this moment in my life, I don’t know what I would tell them about certain things if I did. I wouldn’t be able to give them a good explaination of the hatred and bigotry out there. I wouldn’t be able to explain terrorism or war in a country we’ve been in for 16 years.
Let me just say that in Charlottesville there are not two sides to the story. Hate does not have sides. There are no excuses to what happened there and it should not be tolerated. Being devil’s advocate here, let me also say that as Americans we have freedom of speech and a right to peaceful protest. Keyword being peaceful. That being said any Larry, Mo, or Curly can organize a protest pretty much against anything as long as it’s peaceful.
This may make me a bad person in the eyes of some of you, but these “White Nationalists” were protesting the removal of a Confederate statue. Now I know I don’t hold the same opinion on why they wanted the statue to stay in the park, but I do hold the opinion that we should not try to erase history. Slavery was incredibly wrong and the Civil War even more so, but it happened and there are symbols out there letting us know it happened and we shouldn’t be erasing them we should be learning from them. We should be teaching our children that these symbols do not represent hate but history. It’s so very wrong that we’ve turned a flag and statues and who knows what else into symbols of hate.
I recall learning an edited version of history in school. We were all taught a version that our school district wanted us to learn. History class seemed to be like a big screen movie on tv formatted to fit the screen in the time allowed. We grazed over the Trail of Tears, the War of 1812, the Korean War, Malcolm X, and equal rights for women and gays. Our children shouldn’t learn edited versions of anything. We should not have learned edited versions of events. We should use what’s going on right now as a tool to teach our children to love each other, that the answer can never be found in hate or causing other people terror, that war never completely solves problems but may just in fact create new ones. If we want our country to truly be great, as adults we must set the example for our a children. We need to teach them that everyone is equal no matter what color their skin, what size they are, what religion they practice, or what clothes they wear. We need to start teaching our children not to be afraid of those that are different, but to love them for their differences and to stand up to those that put others down. Until next time, happy reading.
