Give Equal Rights a chance

Pretty much all of you know, that I am all for equal rights in the literal and true since of the word. Many of you are way ahead of me on this.

Back in the 1960s, I was in Seattle, Washington, standing in the checkout line of a large store, and the cashier was an American Negro with dark skin. The idea that people should be required to hire someone of dark skin or other, seemingly arbitrary ‘qualification,’ over someone who actually knew how to do the job, but happened to be white, was a relatively new idea in America. And there was picketing going on outside the store, to require that they hire more people with dark skin.

I, and the people with me, were all white. The young woman looked out the window at the picketers, and then at us, and said, “This really upsets me. I got this job several years ago on my own merits, and I really resent that unqualified people believe that they should be ‘given’ a job just because of their skin color.”

I think I see both sides of the coin. But in America, especially back in those days, I agree that we needed some sort of way to get people of different color to mingle. It’s so much easier to hate someone, when you don’t know anything about them. And in those days, a lot of people were denied jobs. A lot of people of color, were more qualified than the white person hired. But for far too many the attitude was, “Well, I’m sure not going to hire a damn (insert pejorative here)!”

It doesn’t matter who was, or still is, on your hate list, Jews, Blacks, Irish, Italians, Baptists, Gays, Catholics, people that wear a turban, Down’s Syndrome, overweight people, we didn’t really play well with others. In my humble opinion, far too many of us still don’t. But, we’ve come a long way in my lifetime.

For example, in employment, my question would, “Can you do the job well?” Not what gender are you? Or what religion are you? Or what color is your skin? Or what country do you originally come from? Or do you prefer boys or girls? Or how much money do you have? And so on.

Actually, it is nice to know how much money your friends have. I’ve discovered over the years that having very rich friends can have advantages. <wink>

But, some very dear friends don’t have two nickels to rub together. And they are certainly still wonderful people. (In case the word ‘nickel’ is confusing to my non-American friends, it used to be a common coin worth 1/20 of a US dollar. It was made from the metal nickel, in the beginning. That was before the value of the US dollar got so low, that the scrap value of the metal used for common US coins, was more than the face value of the coin. So, they had to change to coins that were less expensive to manufacture.)

But anyway, a friend told me about this nice TED video, and below is a link to a text version. The Internet here in the Marina is not very good, so usually I prefer text to video, only because it is so much faster to download.

http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/17/why-is-my-daughter-strong-because-i-didnt-clip-her-wings-ziauddin-yousafzai-at-ted2014/

If you have spare time and a good Internet connection, have a look at this catalog of TED programs:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsKzpC8gYBmTcGpHbFlILThBSzhmZkRhNm8yYllsWGc&hl=en#gid=0

The weather in Finike has been very nice this winter, on average. Although, I think the farmers could have used a lot more rain. The snowcapped mountains that you can see from the marina, often had large bare spots, that I’ve never seen before during the winter months.

I really enjoy sunny weather, but I understand that life as we know it, does require a certain amount of water. I hope it all goes well.

David