T is for Tiger

Today: Two Americas--A question of Morals and Ethics
(Note: this blog entry was written on wednesday morning, the 3rd of Nov.)


While on a date recently, I was posed this question:

“What are your morals?”

He asked earnestly, expecting that I’d answer with my beliefs on right and wrong—that I’d create a sense for him of who I was as a person and where I stood in the grand scheme of improper and proper, bad and good, evil and holy.

Unfortunately (for the date) I answered with a long pause, then “well, I’m an amoral person.”

This clearly disturbed him.

To really explore the outcome of last night’s (and this morning’s) election, I think it’s important that we look at this question as a fundamental division of our country. How we feel about the question of ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ has begun to define us—for ourselves, for others in the country, for other countries in the world. The development of two distinct value systems is becoming, it would appear, a bigger rift to overcome (for candidates and commoners alike) culminating in what I can only quote the political battle-cry of John Edwards: There are two Americas.

These two Americas that I’m referring to are not ‘the straight and the queer’ Americas, they’re not ‘the black and the white’ they’re not even ‘the rich and the poor.’ They are, in my opinion, the Believers and the Thinkers. The expression of these two Americas is evident in how we relate to each other, the government and the world.

The values of Believers are based in a moral code and usually religious law. Thinkers base their values on ethics and worldly knowledge. Now, I’m not trying to say that these are the only two ways that people are making decisions. There are people that I’m close to that are both ethical and moral. The grey areas, though, are closing in and people seem to be asked by their fellows to make themselves either one or the other, which is problematic for everyone.

The presidential election was lost for Kerry because this country is increasingly believers, and increasingly non-thinkers. People have no problem doing things that are clearly unethical so long as they fit within a prescribed moral code. The lower-middle class knows that Bush’s (or any republican’s, for that matter) domestic economic policies mean bad news for its ranks, but they believe that Bush will protect their morals from the infringement of Homosexuals, Arabs, immigrants and intellectuals on their ideology.

Now I’m biased because I would call myself a thinker. I consider myself pretty fair and strictly constitutional, though people who aren’t in line with my political beliefs refer to me as a ‘liberal’ pejoratively and suggest that I want all sorts of outrageous things like the destruction of churches and the legalization of bestiality.

Though Thinkers in this country are pretty ‘live and let live,’ the Believer culture is not simply at odds, but at war with anyone asking them to question their indoctrination. Ask a Thinker if putting the 10 commandments up in schools is morally wrong, and he’ll probably tell you that there is a clear division of church and state in our country and that the Constitution would suggest that it’s not so much morally wrong as it is simply unconstitutional.

Ask a Believer if it’s inherently racist for legislation to allow Muslim groups to be searched and monitored by the government, but not Christian groups, and you’re not opinionated, you’re anti-church, anti-God, anti-American. There is no grey area for this culture. There is no ‘maybe,’ only the good and holy, the bad and evil. They use phrases like ‘baby killers’ and ‘gay agenda’ to scare their ranks into agreeing with their beliefs.

So, what are my morals? Let me pretend the ‘m’ word wasn’t mentioned and talk about my values: I think that people should have healthcare and that drug companies should be legally obligated to manufacture and release life saving vaccines and medicine. I think that the president should be allowed the line-item veto. I think that pork-barreling should be illegal. I don’t think that single people should pay more taxes because they’re single. I think that my lover (if I have one) should be allowed to keep my possessions and collect on my life insurance policy if I die. I think that terrorism is economically and policy-based, not religion based. I think that a woman should be able to choose weather she keeps a child conceived from a rape. I trust in the Constitution of the United States. I think that logic and world philosophy should be required classes for every person in America. I think that scientists should make the decision on what’s ethically right to do regarding embryonic stem-cells, not churches. I don’t think that the Ten Commandments have any right to our schools or courts. I don’t think the Pledge to the Flag should have ever been revised to include ‘under God.’ I think that the military-industrial complex will destroy the world, literally. My values are ethics, not religious code. In the eyes of moral America, these things make me evil. They make me anti-church, anti-God--make me Anti-American.

”…Not immoral, mind you, amoral. I’m ethical, like I think it’s wrong to kill, but I feel that my values should exist outside any prescribed dogmatic code of morals, so, essentially, I’m amoral.” I went on as my date winced and struggled to come up with an excuse to end the evening early.

“That’s almost worse than if you’d said you were immoral”

I guess will never understand. Though I grew up in a Catholic house and was even confirmed, I have always felt that a person figures out what’s right for himself somewhat regardless of what environment he grows up in. Ethics, in my opinion are where it’s at as far as values are concerned. To be ethical is to have given thought to why you think something, to have questioned why you feel the way you feel. Conversely, to simply believe what people tell you all the time and believe what you have always believed is to be spiritually lazy—psychologically stagnant.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have faith. Faith is important for people to help give a sense of stability to a world that is, if anything, hard to predict. Blind faith, though, to be un-PC, is handicapped (insert a clever joke about Values Systems with disabilities). I’m serious when I say that I’m suspicious of any value system that touts a disability as one of its intrinsically honorable qualities—that’s just how I am. I believe that knowledge is the key to making the best decisions about things, not holding tightly to what gut impulse you have to the point where you’ve dug yourself into a hole (Do you hear that, W.?)

Fortunately for my ego, most modern schools of Philosophy, Sociology, History, Anthropology, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Psychology and a host of others all agree with me that ethics are the value system that most accurately fits the human condition—that blind faith morality essentially denies what the human is: a reasoning being. Worse, though is that knowledge when faced with election results that suggest that more than half of the voting population clearly abandoned thought, knowledge, logic and reason for an almost entirely Belief-based take on the way our government should be run.

It’s not like what I’m saying is new, though. There has been this division between thinkers and believers forever. The church and the government have been walking a fine line for a long, long time. The problem is that now people are being forced to choose what side they’re on more directly. “If you believe abortions or gay marriages are wrong, vote for a republican.” I know a lot of republicans who don’t give a shit weather their sisters have abortions or their gay cousins get to marry—they’re thinkers and they just happen to think that small government is what works. I don’t have any problem with those people, though I disagree with them.

I don’t even have all that much of a problem with people who think I’m wrong about whatever political opinion I have simply because of what I am: gay. For the very reason that I prefer the company of men to women, I’m wrong about everything from military spending to my views on September 11th (which I, unlike most of them, ACTUALLY LIVED THROUGH). My sexuality, something that they know nothing, absolutely nothing about, they think they have an authority on, and think that it’s right to legislate that supposed authority. I don’t mind them because there are people who believe these things and will always believe them, but somehow they think, this year, that that’s really an important issue—that Gays will somehow be the end of the United States. And church leaders in the Midwest and South are urging their constituents to help make sure that we don’t get the rights that most of us believe we’re paying for.

For anyone who is poor and strongly tied to a church, though, that’s becoming a big problem. People have the belief that their church leaders have authority on economic matters, not just moral ones. They believe that their church leaders are looking out not only for their souls but their lives and livelihoods. Sadly, when looking at the demographics in the middle of this country, it’s not appearing that that’s the case. Increasingly, poor and lower middle class America is embracing people who have similar moral values but economic platforms completely divergent from their needs. Sadder still, is the figures that suggest Latinos voted on the ‘morality’ issues this year at the polls this year rather than immigration issues or economic issues that keep a large portion of that population at its knees.

To really sum things up, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the situation, as it stands, a large percent of this country is cutting off its nose to spite its face. The neo-conservative agenda (and yes, there is one) may ensure only the further disempowerment and disenfranchisement of those of us who aren’t Christian or white or straight. I don’t know where to go from here. The next four years are crucial though; I can feel that much. And I’m scared.

I’m writing this on the train into New York, and as I typed that last sentence, I passed a flag on a building that was hung too closed to cyclone fence. The wind and weather had clearly taken its toll on the poor fabric, which was faded and shredded. How fitting. I wonder if anyone realizes that by installing a government that promotes fear and xenophobia rather than tolerance that we’re only ensuring the utter destruction of whatever there is to fight for in this democracy?