Quote: But having lived in North Carolina for long enough now to have seen what people are like in the populated and unpopulated parts of the South,
Would you care to guess where I have been living since 05? North Carolina, and prior to that Lynchburg Va, so I DO KNOW what people can be like and what the majority climate is down here.
But where I live we also have tons of elderly retireees from up north. My mom plays cards with one woman from up north who licks the cunt of Ann Coulter and she is originally from up north. And most of the WHITE people that live in her retirement community ARE bigots from up north. Not all of them, but most of them.
If we are to defeat bigotry it has to be about the climate of the location and not lump every person who happens to live in it for what the majority in it thinks.
I am the only atheist I where I work, but I do not rail against my co-workers foaming at the mouth even if I find ALL god claims absurd. I live by example and when they see that, it dispells those myths they have of atheists.
Even in Lynchburg I worked at a fast food joint and the black manager female was deeply religious, when she found out I was an atheist, initially she tried everything she could to make my life so misserable to get me to quit. But one day she accedently locked the day's proceeds in the office and could not get in, and knew that the store manager who was a bully to everyone including her would have fired her. I told her "Don't call him, if I am correct about the cealing tile I should be able to climb over the wall and unlock the office". Sure enough, that is what I did, and believe me her attitude changes that minute.
You dont beat hate with hate. You can hate behavior and you can and should ridicule hatemongers. But you stil have to pick your battles and know who can be an allie and who you should fight. She ended up quitting for the same reason I did, because we both hated being bullied. I saw her weeks after that before she quit and she had a smile on her face when we talked about me getting fired when I called him a bully.
I love my co-workers even if I hate what they believe. I love my mother who is Catholic who unfortunately voted for Romney. But we cant throw everyone who is a victim of a climate out if we can potentially make them allies.
The saving grace about Lynchburg that I enjoyed was that Liberty was not the only college in town 2 other liberal colleges are a constant thorn in the Falwell family's side. Richard Dawkins did a speech at Randolf Macon Women's college which is in the sticks just outside the city. The college I graduated from also hates the Falwell Family and I have even met students whom I worked with from his college who hated lots of his embarassing crap.
One of those students was a guy named Brandon, a 22 year old who was my boss for a time. He saw how hard I worked and one day the Franchise owner's son came in and bullied me so bad I asked my boss if I could go home. I found out the next day that Branded had stood up to him and told him he may own the franchise but he does not run the store and that I was Brandon's employee not his. I was so proud of him, not because he was Christian, but because of his human compassion that dispite that I was an atheist he still saw my ethics and goodness.
So while you do see my fangs from time to time here, I never lose my compassion. A fight is one thing, but our human condition as a species has never been differnt.
It is ok to hate bigotry. It is a moral mandate to fight it. But it is not ok to assume that a label will automatically mean that by proxy of label someone is bad. We don't like it when beleivers do it to us and I refuse to do it to others. So when I pull my fangs out, it is at claims. It is at bullies. It is at individuals, because that is all we really are in reality.
