Give the Christian right neocons the "Culture of Life," which seems to mean keeping people in vegetative states breathing against their will and placing a higher value on blastocysts than on the inarguably alive - and often poverty-stricken - women harboring them. Let them have the phrase and the attendant hypocrisy of underfunding prenatal health care for the poor, supporting the death penalty and carrying on wars. I want something very different from substinence level "life" in my culture, where all that seems to matter is that your heart is beating and the "culture" is satisfied.
What I hunger for is very old-fashioned. I feel foolish admitting it, but what I crave in these darkening times is ... a culture of honor. Silly, yes? Especially for a lifelong liberal like me ... it's so ... 19th century. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but I'm finding a need - a real, soul-crying need -- to live in an honorable country, among honorable people, where certain acts are permanently accepted as beyond the pale.
It's a really small list, actually, those unacceptable acts. No lying. No stealing. No torturing people. No killing. No dumping deadly chemicals in a river and neglecting to mention it to the people downstream. Seems straightforward, seems not all that much to ask.
And I want to live in a country and on a planet with people who agree that the purpose of society is to honor the basic dignity of each human being, that societal constraints and structures - economic, educational, governmental - are designed to foster the highest and the best in each of us. To me, this means quality education and health care, job opportunities and the guarantee that you won't be humiliated by some grocery clerk with a Jesus pin and an attitude when you use food stamps at the grocery store after your firm fires you and 24,999 other co-workers, as happened to a friend of mine recently.
Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across a very selfish human nature. We humans, biologists tell us, are only 1% of DNA away from other primates, and we revert to our most primitive and punitive selves in times of stress, threat or scarcity. It's a biological imperative; it's made us survivors. Living in a small, mean, competitive societal structure, where it's every person for himself - and where the modern GOP seems hellbent on taking us, in accelerated time - ignites the worst in us, collectively and individually. We become what we most loathe and fear (nasty and brutish and alien to each other) and we might as well crawl back to the caves under these pressurized conditions.
On the other hand, we are a wondrous and splendid species, given the right circumstances, capable of great heroism, sacrifice, ingenuity and generosity. And science and literacy, it seems to me, have given us the wherewithal to design the right circumstances, if we can just loosen the handgrip of irrational fear that seems to be triggered periodically - most recently by the horror of Sept. 11, which seems in hindsight to have thrown our national primitive brain into the highest gear of fight or flight (we all know which of those two responses "real" Americans choose, and Bush proved us right).
It seems so simple to me that I know I must be missing something. Treat every human being with dignity, be an honest and straightforward human being yourself, and create a culture of honor. Those who disregard these simple precepts should be ostracized. I say this from my newfound fondness of the Victorian era (and please, don't bring up its faults, I know them well). Shame is not a bad thing. Guilt is good. If you've just thrown out the Geneva Conventions, authorized torture, invaded a country and killed 100,000 people, you should feel utterly abandoned and shamed forever in the eyes of history. Honor calls for it.
Consider this irony for a moment: the very people who most discredit evolution and fight its teaching in our schools swoon with ecstasy at the notion of social Darwinism, nature red in tooth and claw, the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the social safety net. Then here I am as a lefty liberal, essentially pleading for a return to some basic human principles laid down by Jesus of Nazareth a couple of thousand years ago.
So here's my personal offer: As much as I cherish the separation of church and state, I'd be willing in a heartbeat to live with the Ten Commandments inscribed on every public building in the land if the Christian right and its fellow corporate travelers would agree to live by them. The problem is, of course, that we couldn't count on them to honor their end of the agreement, now could we?