we are all equal versus i’m better than you

i was driving home this afternoon when i had a realisation: this society is screwed up, mentally, and it comes from the fact that there are two very powerful, but entirely opposite messages being propagated from a very early age. one message is that everyone is equal: things like the constitution, the bill of rights and even the pledge of allegiance emphasise the fact that nobody is better than anybody else, and that all of us are just human beings. the other message is that there are some people who are better than other people. this was driven home to me by a bumper sticker i saw on the back of the car in front of me that said “Cougar Pride” and had the name of some elementary school on it.

of course, what it said to me is that the students of whatever elementary school it was are indoctrinated to believe that their school is better than the other schools in the area. it was intended, most likely, to elicit pride in the school’s sports teams, but it clearly was intended to represent the entire “cougar” population, regardless of whether or not they were on a sports team. and it obviously doesn’t matter to anyone that the population is being indoctrinated, because i’ve seen exactly the same message on bumper stickers for every school that has thought about it in the slightest degree.

i see things like this all the time: “our sports team is better than yours”, or “our city is better than yours”, or “our religion is better than yours” — but we’re all equal, all just human beings, nobody is “better” than anybody else.

society is going to continue to be screwed up until we start teaching our children consistent messages and stop being contradictory.

2 thoughts on “we are all equal versus i’m better than you”

  1. They don’t see it as a contradictory message. Everyone is born equal, and then some people who happen to have money, a lack of a high crime rate, and generally good neighborhoods and schools are able to make more of themselves with their education and lives, because of their superior work ethic. Anyone who doesn’t get as much out is just lazy or unmotivated.

    It’s not like black men are more likely to be convicted of crimes, instead of driven home and left with their parents – it’s because black people are just villains and criminals.

    Atheists, gay people and lesbians are already equal, they have all the same rights that anyone else does to get into a heterosexual marriage or to worship in a church. Anything other than that is special rights and destroys our God-given equality and right to worship jeezis as God.

    You must hate America that you see some sort of inequality in our perfect exemplar society or something.

    1. yep, you’re right, i do hate a land that tells me one thing, does exactly the opposite, and then blames the victim when he starts to question the whole thing…

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