About Whom Do We Care?

OK. Yeah, nobody uses that "proper" form of avoiding the prepositions you shouldn't end a sentence with. But it's nice to reminisce. That's what you do as you get older. The "you" in this case being me. Who knows what you two do?

So I've been reminiscing about the olden days when people were nicer, kinder.

Only I can't recall exactly when that was.

Was it in ancient China when the dynasties had everything organized and torture was a fine art that... OK, maybe not ancient China.

Was it in the Middle Ages when Christianity was spreading throughout the known world (that is to say the world known to the Romans)?  Not if you read your Ivanhoe it wasn't.

Was it in the great days of the spread of Islam. Well, if you were male and on the winning side, maybe. Or lucky enough to be one of the widows of conquered rulers that Mohammed married. But anyone else, not so much.

Was it more recently, in the United States in the 1950's, like my old fogie friends on Facebook seem to think? Back when lynching African Americans was a popular white Christian activity, various children were treated obscenely and not heard, and no woman in her right mind admitted to having been raped. Well, I guess not for everyone, at any rate.

So maybe this is it; this is the nicer, kinder time.

But I'm not so sure we don't have some room for improvement.  I'm not sure we all agree about whom we should care about. To coin a phrase.

Now, at this point, all of you politically correct folks who are offended when humor is used to mock the apparent excesses of some identifiable-with-one-word group the members of which are currently living, please stop reading and get to some serious and politically correct endeavor. The following is not guaranteed to conform to anyone's notion of inoffensive observations.

I don't call myself a Christian because too many people have given it a bad name.

My Christian heritage is also the proud heritage of some very devout people who would force a 14-year-old to have her baby after she was raped by Uncle Willie but not lift a finger to help her and said baby when her parents kick her out because they don't believe her that it was Uncle Willie.  It seems unfair to me that the devout Christians get the warm glow and the 14-year-old gets the blame when her kid doesn't turn out so well.

My Christian heritage is also the proud heritage of people in group A who think they have the right to make rules for the people in group B about whom they can love, or whom they can get away with loving not-so-consentually, or whom they should hate unreservedly, or whom they should incarcerate, or whom they should have a legal right to shoot, and so on.

And of people in group C (for Capitalist) who have rules about whom they can cheat legally so that they can screw all the other good Christians in town, especially the non-white ones, as long as they do it financially, and be pillars of the community because of it. I won't go into what kind of pillar that would be.

So my question is, about whom do we care?  How many whoms does it take to give us the good name we humans expect we should have? Whom is in charge of that?