From the Gannet Contemporary History Final, based on some of the presentations students have been making and with thanks to the writers of The West Wing:
If you had unlimited funds to address any of these issues -- AIDS, women and poverty, global warming -- for a period of two years, which would you choose, and why?
What irritates me about TDC:
Why oh why did it all have to boil down to sex? Why couldn't a woman and a man be in a deep and committed friendship, without having to have sex? I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that sex is almost always an issue between women and men, but it's not the only one.
And THEN, because a woman who has sex must be a whore, we have to recreate her pristine purity by ensuring that she has a child, so that she can be madonna rather than harlot.
So Mary Magdalene is reduced to Angelina Jolie, which makes Jesus -- oh, let's not even go there.
5 comments:
Not so sure about your characterization of TDC. To say it was "about sex" seems a little tawdry. It might very well have been about marriage. It would have been unusual for a Jewish man of Jesus' age and time to have been unmarried, wouldn't it? NO idea why the framers of the Christian bible would have wanted that fact deleted...but they could have done so if they had so desired. I find it eminently believable that they did. If I am a gullible sap for believing this, so be it.
Global warming - I just saw the Al Gore movie, and it was sobering, to say the least. We are killing this planet and if we don't address it very soon, the other issues will be irrelevant, for there will be nowhere to live. Though could I save some to spend on the other issues? (There's the Libra in me!)
V
All of the issues you suggest are so important; it's hard to choose just one. But, with unlimited funds, I think I would tackle what has been such a difficult one for years---poverty. If we really could "lift all boats" and provide people with the skills and incentives to keep them afloat, the long-term result would be more wealth--material, cultural, spiritual, emotional--to underwrite the cost of dealing with the other issue. However, I don't think that poverty, AIDS, global warming or the status of women could be changed much in only two years.
Unlimited funds? Give every poor woman 5 million. End of poverty. Next question?
Global warming...
As the planet becomes uninhabitable, the problems that follow become insurmountable.
Post a Comment