Respect

By Tom Quiner

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0nFW84VS04&feature=player_embedded#!]

What is the essence of being human?

One quality immediately hits me. It’s the ability to respect.

It’s the ability to respect human life.

It’s the ability to respect our neighbors, to love them as ourselves.

It’s the ability to respect our environment, to be good stewards of this great land.

What is involved with being respectful? For one thing, it involves showing consideration. And for another, it involves not violating something.

I think this is what is so baffling many on the political right when it comes to those on the political left.

Those on the right consider it natural, logical, and imperative to respect human life in the womb. But the left doesn’t. They aggressively block any laws designed to protect such life.

What is so baffling is that the left bends over backwards to protect rodent life and insect life with the passage of endangered species laws.

Why does one political perspective view the fetus with no respect, while another reveres it?

And yet both sides of the political spectrum support endangered species laws.

The political left also respects the environment. They have passed laws that make it time-consuming and expensive to move forward on construction projects in the name of protecting wet lands and animal life. This is one of the reasons President Obama’s “shovel-ready” projects never materialized when they passed the mammoth stimulus package. It takes five to seven years of legal groundwork to simply get started building new roads. The environmental red tape is just that complex. Any benefits of those types of projects take more than a decade to realize.

This leads me to an inexplicable dichotomy.

Two huge rallies took place at the nation’s capital a year ago, in the same space where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech.

One was Glen Beck’s huge rally. The other was the liberal response.

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered for each.

So, who left the premises in better condition: the liberals or the conservatives?

Most folks would assume it would be the liberals, because they CARE more about the environment. Right?

But that’s not what happened, according to Mr. Beck’s video footage at the top of this post. According to Mr. Beck, conservatives left the space cleaner than they found it. They picked up their own trash.

The video footage of the liberal’s rally shows they left a huge mess behind.

Which leads us back to the question of respect.

If liberals really respect the environment more, why would they show such disrespect to the environment surrounding the Capital Mall? It’s possible Glen Beck doctored the videos and the whole thing is an anti-liberal conspiracy inspired by hate-mongering conservatives.

What do you think? Do the videos smack of truth?

The evidence is pretty damning. When environmentalists had a chance to show us how they demonstrate respect for Mother Earth, what did they do? They fumed, they fomented, and unleashed their full fury for the benefit of the panting media.

And then they walked away leaving a garbage dump behind.

Do you call this respect?