dream time

for once i had a not-so-horrifying dream that dealt with human rights...

i was at chick-fil-a getting food and walking out the the door a woman yells to me "hey! don't forget your free water!" i turn around and sure enough there's a table set up with gallons of water waiting to be handed out. thinking to myself "okay, why not?" i go over there and she smiles and askes to see my driver's license. confused, i hand it over and she immidiately gives it back, not smiling anymore. "we're sorry, you can't have any." i ask why and she says "because you're not protestant."

i look down at my id and it has the religion i was baptized in to. furious i ask her "you mean i can't get free water because i'm catholic? you can't do that!" "yes we can. we are a private establishment. and i think it would be best for you to leave now."

it was here that i realized that this was law now-- people could treat you however they wanted based on this information. it didn't even matter if you had converted-- what was on the card mattered. if you were baptized a catholic and then became jewish it wouldn't matter-- in the eyes of everyone you were a catholic first. all forms of id had my religion on it, including my school id and my passport.



that's only one part of the dream, but holy shit. the free water may sound funny and all, yet the underlying matter is definitely not. the fact that all forms of id had our religion on it is a terrifying concept to me. if you get pulled over by a cop he/she would know if you were catholic, baptist, jewish, luther, muslim, buddist, atheist, whatever. if you have to apply for a job and they want a copy of your license to do a background check they would have that information. and passports! don't even get me started.

serioulsy, this dream could be something right out of what i'm learning about rome. italy applied a load of "raical laws" to the country in 1938 (right before WWII) in show of support for their lovely ally, germany. jews were kicked out of schools, textbooks by jewish authors couldn't be used anymore, they couldn't own a business that had more than 100 employees, it goes on and on and gets worse as time went by.

but i think my dream is coming from the part about the marriage law and the definition of a jew. intermarriage was banned and all catholics, if married to a jew, were to be treated as such. the pope went crazy over this and tried get it so catholics would be protected, but he didn't even speak up about the other laws. also, the facist state's definition of a jew was anyone who's parents or grandparents were jewish--- the religion they were born into.

luckily the majority of italians thought these laws were crazy, considering the jewish population in rome is one of the oldest in europe and everything had been fine for centuries. even mussolini didn't stand fully behind his own laws and it wasn't until a coup overthrew the fascit goverment (thus making germany come and save mussolini's ass and occupy rome) that the jewish community saw the full effects of the horror that is the Holocaust.


wow...i definitely didn't mean to turn this into a history lesson. oh well.