Point of view
Oct.12, 1995
EQUALITY IS NOT A MYTH
Overton Love Turner II
"Dr. king dreamed of an America where every man would be judged by
the content of his character and not the color of his skin."
The news media have reported on all the strife in the Los Angeles Police
Department. It makes one uneasy to think that those we look to for protection
are themselves fighting each other and destroying the efficiency of their
mandate. It is all racial strife. Race is not going away. You and I and
every other American not only will live with this problem every day, but
will live with it the rest of our lives. I do not know about our posterity;
they may wake up and see race for the myth it is.
The poet Robert Frost put it this way:
That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of
course the easy way
Is to decide it really isn't true,
It may not be, I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, that
Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
It is a myth. I was reading a science magazine and a leading scientist
wrote, "Race is based on pigment, and pigment is only skin deep."
Once you break through the pigment, every human is the same. We have the
same brain, the same senses, the same lungs and heart, the same guts,
and we procreate in the same way. What is so terrible about this is that
we create so much strife and bloodshed over a myth. It has no substance,
and yet we use it to dehumanize people who, except for pigment, are just
like us. Race is a striving against air.
This nation in 1861-64 killed more than 2,813,363 million men. It was
a waste, most of them died for a myth. This does not account for all the
dead due to mobs and the Ku Klux Clan since 1864. Nor those executed in
prisons mainly because of pigment. We live and die by our myth, and are
therefore fools.
Mr. Jefferson's mystery is really self-evident. When Jesus said, "For
what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Or what can a man give in exchange for his life?" He was saying that
every man's life has the same value since the value is absolute. It cannot
be exchanged. Without life I cannot create or enjoy anything; all my potentiality
for being in the world depends on having life, and on being accepted by
the people already in the world. Every person, in respect to his being,
is an inviolable person. This is a self-evident truth. No man can prove
his life is more valuable than another man's life: equal value, yes; more
value, no.
This is a self-evident truth, and the Founding Fathers said that upon
this truth America would be built. My, my, we still have our work cut
out. Our equality is not a myth; it can be established by logic and common
sense. Pigment is the myth, and it can be established by science and common
sense. All thinking and civilized people accept this truth.
The big question is: When are we going to stop dehumanizing our brothers
and sisters over a stupid myth?
Do not you think it is about time?
