Let me begin by saying that I’m going to tread lightly in this post for a variety of reasons, the largest of them being: (a) I’m referring to an incident at my place of employment and (b) it’s a sensitive topic in our society today.
In the United States, we have designated certain days and months for a variety of honorary or acknowledgment remembrances. For example, Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day for the American veteran’s (fallen, missing, living and passed) of various military actions around the world. Our company sends out reminders on those days which I truly appreciate. However, recently, our company (and others based on conversations with collegues) have begun to send out notices about other types of remembrances. March was the Irish-American Heritgage month. May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage month. November is the American Indian/Alaska Native Heritage month. And September 21-27, 2008 was the Unmarried and Single American’s Week (
I kid you not).
While I do appreciate the rich cultural heritage of this country, I find it disturbing that we need to segregate out particular ethnicities. We are the melting pot. America wouldn’t be where it is today without all of these ethnic groups and more (Germans, Swedes, Turkish, Russian, Mexican, Central and South American, Spanish, French, etc.). Just by listing them, I’ve excluded others just as the government has done with the heritage designations and just as my company’s president and human resources department has done with the monthly memos highlighting these. Is that accomplishing the goal that Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned where people are judged not by the color of their skin (or ethnic background) but by the content of their character.
I’m an American with a rich cultural heritage but first and foremost, I’m an American. Please, don’t foist these racial categorizations upon me to delineate our differences for we are stronger together than we are apart.
GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.
