Eskimos Schmeskimos

Please forgive my horrible grammar and choppy sentences. This is very unstructured.



Let's talk for a moment on ethical codes in different parts of the world. The best example for this would be one given in a class I am taking.



Darius, who was a king of ancient Persia, was intrigued by the variety of cultures he encountered in his travels. He had discovered that Callatians, a tribe of Indians, customarily ate the body of their deceased fathers. The Greeks, obviously, did not practice this tradition. Instead, the Greek pepole cremated the bodies of the dead and found it to be the natural and fitting way to dispose of them. Darius thought that a sophisticated understanding of the world must include an appreciation of such differences between cultures.



Eskimo traditons are also very different from our own. The men often had more than one wife, and when a guest stayed at thier residence, the husband would the lend the guest his wife for the night as a gesture of hospitality. Eskimos also seemed to have less regard for human life. Infanticide was common. An early explorer reported that he had once met a woman who had twenty children, but hilled ten of them at birth with infanticide. Also, when people became too elderly and feeble to contribute to the household, they were left out in the snow to die.



In America, it is quite obvious that we don't find it customary to eat our fathers, have more than one wife, or leave our relatives to die. However, the killing of the babies is questionable. But this blog is not about murder of babies, so I won't go into that. We also don't find it customary to have a leader of the religion Islam. Yes, our nation was created for religious freedom. However, a majority of the first settlers of the United States were Protestants. They were followers of Christ. We don't find it customary to "redistribute the wealth", or anything else a certain someone wants for our country.

So in the world and throughout history, which ethical codes are the right ethical codes? The only answer to this question is to look at the ancestors and previous generations. This is not what our Founding Fathers wanted for us when they developed our government. With so much "change" he wants to make, we can expect everything we've worked for since our country was born to be poured down the drain. Barack Obama is not what our Founding Fathers would want.

-Meghan