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De Profundis Clamo Ad Te Domine

“From the depths I cry out to you, O Lord.” — From the prayers prayed in Psalms.

No, this is not going to be a religious post. Actually, I don’t plan on really ever writing about religion because… well, just because.

I was reading something this weekend, and I found this quote. It got me thinking about Oscar Wilde and the letter he wrote a few weeks (I believe) before he died. It was titled De Profundis (you can read an excerpt here).

Anyway, my point in bringing this up is because thinking about him made me think about the weirdness that is life. Let’s face it, anyone who knew about/studied him (like I did a few years ago) just knows that he was a weird guy.

He lived in indulgences, he was an interesting man. Very brilliant I would think. He practiced Aestheticism and lived a decadent life. Many may know him because he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, which scared the crap out of me. He wrote many other plays, poems, & etc. that I have read.

However, it was his desire to “live life to the fullest” (and I’m sure my old English professor would die because I’m using this cliche) that led to his downfall.

The problem was that although he accepted his differences, others did not. He was a gay man living in a constricting world. From what I remember from that class, he had love affairs with men–well, older boys, but married a woman, had children, got caught, was imprisoned, got out, was abandoned, and died from syphilis.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about his life, only the implications there in.

Have we really changed from back in the late 1800s? Are people no longer persecuted for being who they are.

I’m not talking about committing crimes like murder, I’m talking about more “simple things” like loving whoever you want to.

Or being whatever color you are.

I think that although we’ve come a far way–speaking really about America–but we’ve got a long way to go yet. (Although really, the early American’s learned everything they knew from Britain and people from Northern and Western Europe did they not? Sure, they are more progressive, but there was still that element there first.)

People are talking about whether or not Barack Obama can be elected President in 2008, or possibly Hillary Clinton (let’s hope not, she’s really not progressive when it comes to women’s rights or the rights of the poor and their children at all).

I just wonder if we really have taken the strides towards equality that everyone always talks about.

No, I don’t think that racism, sexism, sectoral discrimination, and to a lesser extent ageism are as blatant as they have been, I just think, in many ways, they are more subtle than before.

In our efforts to be politically correct, we’re just being socially hypocritical.

If you ask me, I think that it’s about damn time that someone like Barack Obama becomes president. Maybe–and this is definitely selfish as well as progressive–we can show the rest of the world that we are as open as we claim.

More importantly, we can show ourselves that in order to have equality, we must practice it. Not only in the back rooms of department stores, or on the paved roads of Wall Street. But, also in the golden aisles of the Senate and the House, and most importantly in the whitewashed walls of the Oval Office.