Tag Archives: American exceptionalism

Chauvinism

Chauvinism: (n) prejudiced loyalty or support for one’s own cause, group, or gender.

Chauvinism is an actual condition when the insecurity of one group of people forces them to usurp their authority by using domination.

It is not a “safe word” that women can use when they’ve lost an argument and want to change the subject to make it seem that they are being
attacked by some sort of Neanderthal.

Chauvinism is an actual predicament.

It is not a return to the past, but instead, a maintaining of the worst. For after all, there are many things from the past that we’ve abandoned just to make sure we don’t die.

For instance, it used to be avant garde to smoke cigarettes, and now it’s limited to Hollywood bad guys and white trash.

We do have the common sense to reject certain things of the past, like smallpox, measles and even the flu, which used to kill off thousands.

So the contention that we want to return to the “good old days” means that we want to go back to days that were not that good and nobody was really allowed to get old.

So what is chauvinism?

It is anyone who believes he or she is exceptional for any reason whatsoever. If you happen to be exceptional in some field, just do your work and let other people proclaim your excellence.

If you find yourself tooting your own horn, be prepared for folks to find you brassy.

There’s a danger even when referring to America as an “exceptional nation”–for the things that make us exceptional have absolutely nothing to do with the populace. They are the freedoms we purposely grant to those who are not always exceptional.

I must come back to my standard mantra: no one is better than anyone else.

You don’t achieve much by trying to contradict it, and the pursuit of believing it grants you the purity of heart to actually see God in the world around you.

 

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Armistice

dictionary with letter A

Armistice: (n) an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce.

All wars end.

Without them ending, we wouldn’t have enough time to procreate to make new soldiers to go off in battle to die.

So those in power determine that there is a way to get along with the enemy, creating terms of peace.

I guess common sense would dictate that we ask the important question, “Why couldn’t these same terms have been negotiated before we had to stack the bodies?”

Since rarely do the conditions of the termination of conflict satisfy either side totally, why couldn’t such a truce be negotiated in the head instead of chopping off heads?

There is an itch in humanity. It is an insecurity that makes us believe if we are not proclaimed superior to those around us, that we really have not achieved our goals.

  • We start calling ourselves “exceptional.”
  • We fling around high-sounding words such as “destiny.”
  • And we start believing we are doing the will of God by terminating a race of people who are obviously in His displeasure.

I know it is not considered to be patriotic to question the wars that have stained the consciousness of our country. Even when the history books point out the useless slaughter in the human family, we are still encouraged to rally around some purpose for the annihilation.

I remember when I was a kid, there was a saying which became very popular for a brief season: “What if they held a war and no one showed up?”

For that to happen, we would have to begin to believe that other inhabitants of Earth can disagree with us without being snuffed.

Did you ever consider that we don’t go into the forest and kill all the bears, even though we know that if we went into the forest, the bears might kill us?

There doesn’t seem to be a vendetta to destroy all the members of the lion kingdom, even though we are quite aware they are “man-eating.”

So we have an ongoing truce with the animals in nature, which we don’t seem to be able to apply to our brothers and sisters on earth.

Is it possible if I run across humans who think they’re bears and lions … that I can just stay out of their neck of the woods?

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