all men are created equal...well, except you.

I’ve been struggling lately with marrying my belief in holding humanity to certain standards with our society’s politically correct version of ‘multi-culturalism’. I’m a progressive liberal.  I’m all about diversity and equality.  I totally sweat culture.  I donate to the Human Rights Campaign & Green Peace, I love Def Poetry Jam AND I own a ukulele.  What more can I do?  But there’s this little anchor that’s been keeping my cultural sensitivity and appreciation from reaching its true potential.  The little anchor I refer to goes by the name of “omitted for security reasons”.  Before you drive a truck loaded with explosives into my house, hear me out.

All societies are fucked up.  I mean, who am I to judge a culture that forces 8 year olds to marry and have sex with 30 year olds when my culture has produced, in no particular order- Mormon fundamentalists, Paris Hilton, George W. Bush, and CBS’s Two and a Half Men?  We clearly don’t have a leg to stand on, right?  Except…I think we do.  Is it wrong to believe that all cultures are NOT created equal; that maybe there are some societies that are better/happier/fairer?  At the risk of seeming like a racist/smug/insensitive/cultural Nazi (no offense to members of my extended family)- I do think that there are some societies that have ‘gotten it’ more than others.

We live in a world where some cultures believe that it is ok to stone a woman to death for being raped.  Where it is ok to sell children to perverts.  Where it ok to hang gay people, cut off poor people’s hands for stealing and listen to this or this.  I don’t think of myself as a cultural imperialist.  I don’t want everyone to watch MTV, engage in casual sex or drink dirty martinis till everyone in the bar’s a 10 (ps- Friday can’t come soon enough).  But I DO want our world to agree on a few fundamental principals.  That everyone deserves the right to EXIST and everyone deserves the right to be HAPPY (unless, of course, killing me would make you happy.  Consider the loophole closed, fucker).

There is nothing intrinsically better about any man, woman or child on earth.  You say potato, I say potatah.  You say freedom fighter, I say homicidal jihadist.  We are all born with the same potential.  But as we grow, mature and soak in the info, or lack thereof, around us- we branch like a big family tree.  Some of us go on to invent the pencil eraser and Velcro while some of us are killed after a night of heavy drinking and risky sex on train tracks.  That’s life- and that’s culture.  People in cultures that have been left behind are not at fault.  There are very real (and therefore fixable) reasons for this lag- poverty, war, bad leadership, imperialism, and the list goes on.  But until people actually admit that, unfortunately, all cultures are NOT created equal and that some of them need to be repaired, updated, and synced with my Blackberry- we are getting nowhere.  The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem (the second step, coincidentally, is realizing that your problem is probably someone else’s fault).