The State of Equality

You know, this is something that I have had difficulty with most of my adult life. Equal is equal. It's not some political, or even social, split test with different variables and rules that just happens to return the equal results.

In the 70's it was the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) which did not result in equality for women in the workforce but rather a dual set of tests designed to bring more women into occupations they were not qualified or physically able to do. Should women make the exact same money as men for doing the same job: ABSOLUTELY! Should women be artificially inserted into male dominated fields (such as police, fire, oil rigs, mining and manual labor) just to fulfill some political quota: ABSOLUTELY NOT! I have no trouble accepting a woman in any of these positions as long as they are willing to perform the work AND are capable of doing so physically. Male or female, I'm not going to be real happy if they are in a fire suit and can't carry my 160 pound ass to the curb before the roof of my house falls on my head.

Race is another place where I run into difficulty. I am American, I only want to be American. I don't want to be African-American, Latino-American, Greek-American, Asian-American or French-American. Fuck, I was born in San Jose, California! If that don't make me a damn American, without the need of a hyphen, we really are screwed! I want to be treated as an equal, and more importantly, I want to treat EVERYONE as an equal. I don't want, or need, to know your fucking geneaology in order to know you and I are both equal in this state we call humanity. For all those who want or like the hyphen, I have a suggestion: Live a year in both places (I don't care which two they are), pick the one you like the best, move permanently, and lose the fucking hyphen so you can be ALL of one thing or another!

The point is this: Mabye, just maybe, once we can start addressing everyone as an equal we can start TREATING everyone as an equal. I do not foresee the human race becoming blind so we cannot see a nice ass or a cute face or someone's skin color so the question of equality is going to be with us for quite a while. But damn, do we HAVE to point out our differences all the time?