So, I'm pretty sure that I've quoted Ferris Bueller before, but I think that in light of recent events, as always, he is my go-to philosopher: "Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself."
Right wing conservatism and left wing liberalism currently hold our nation's financial future hostage, leaving the whole world economy in a state of jeopardy. While most of us realize that we are very much beholden to China, financially speaking, the American economy is so important that if it falls, many other economies will fall as well. While our leaders fight over Democratic altruism and Republican and Tea Party support of capitalism, the rest of us can only hope that at the eleventh hour, a compromise can be found that will help us avoid certain disaster. I think many of us have forgotten that much of our dire financial straits are a direct result of being held hostage by a current war on yet another "ism," that being terrorism.
Between 1925 and 1933, a political movement promising a new era of prosperity, hope and redemption for the people of Germany slowly rose to power. Nazism's success was buoyed by a wave of nationalism from a people that had been stripped of so much after its loss to the Allied Powers in what was then the Great War.
The heady intoxication of rhetoric and nationalism gave a radical extremist the power to set a chain of violence and destruction in motion that resulted in the deaths of approximately sixty million civilians and military servicemen combined.
The disturbing and heinous level of antisemitism, propelled to the fore by Nazism, resulted in the deaths of approximately six million Jews. Those deaths resulted in a powerful fertilization of the seeds of Zionism, which now pits Israeli against Palestinian in a no-win struggle for homeland territory.
I think it would be impossible to accurately calculate the number of deaths that have been a direct result of racism here or in other countries.
Thousands have been killed as a result of Islamic extremism. Still thousands more have been killed in the Global War on Terrorism.
And this past weekend, extreme nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment became the most recent deadly "ism" to put an end to about seventy-five lives--mostly young ones.
When I think of "isms," they all seem to have one thing in common. They are typically the expression of an extreme and exclusionary view. In many cases, those expressions start out innocently enough, but off-kilter individuals radicalize them until they become unrecognizable.
"Isms" dehumanize us and turn us into something we are unable to see. It's as if we become vampires and cannot see our own reflections. If we could, I want to believe that we would not so easily fall behind those who lead the charge.
No, "isms" are not good.
http://youtu.be/ULKWm3HxqQo
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