More than anything, I find
zealotry distasteful--and I'm catching a strong whiff of it coming off of this "
Easter Bomb Hunt" scheduled to coincide with the White House's easter egg hunt. Holidays, as we all know, are the best time to indoctrinate the kiddies with your beliefs through cheap ploys designed to attract media attention. But hey, it's not like the goals of discussing the very real hazards of unexploded ordnance and providing merriment for children are mutually exclusive or anything:
"Obviously, we're trying to spoof a little bit what will be happening on the South Lawn," said Brian Hennessey of the Vineeta Foundation, a local human rights group founded in 1995 that is the lead sponsor of the cluster-bomb hunt. "We're not trying to hit kids over the head with this; we want them to have fun. We also want to bring attention to the fact that our munitions cause a lot of death and destruction to civilians, especially children." ... He said he has read a few comments from people wondering if it is right to expose children to thoughts of bombings and death when all they are after is a pleasant holiday experience. "I think a more important question is whether we should be exposing other people's children to these bombs," he said.
And if he really believes that false choice between using his young children in a political act or blowing up the children of others actually exists, I pity the wasteland of his offspring's childhood. Like Robert Heinlein, I mistrust any moral code that doesn't ultimately flow from self-interest. When one cares more about marginal gains to be made for the children of others by your actions than one does about whether your child is of an age to know that exploding things can fall out of the sky and lie hidden along the roadsides, it leads me to question the rest of one's motives and reasoning. Maybe that's an intolerant, zealot reaction on my own part, but at least one that I hope to avoid inflicting on my children through a series of morality plays.
2 comments:
Mistrust? Because of unpredictability? Because you can't figure out the other person's angle?
Frankly, I don't know what moral codes I distrust. But ones that are premised on self-interest definitely fall into that category.
So, I'd quibble with the definition of self-interest. But I don't quite know why.
Oh, but I agree with you--"Easter Bomb Hunts" are just ridiculous. I'd say they're inherently ridiculous (tasteless, disconnected) and, more importantly, they're functionally ridiculous (counterproductive to the group's purpose). That is, I don't buy that there's no such thing as bad publicity. It's bad publicity when, as here, your organization looks like petty and stupid zealots.
There are at least three types of moral codes or outlooks, all based on self interest.
1. Explicitly based on self interest.
2. Based on self interest, but which the individual claims is not based on self interest.
3. Based on self interest, but which the individual truly believes is not based on self interest.
I'll let the reader decide which I find the most frightening.
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