“Tradition” is one of those words that is supposed to conjure respect, honor, nostalgia, and warm fuzzies of goodness in people but has the opposite effect on me. I’m wary of it. A lot of times calling something “tradition” is like pointing out the pretty new wallpaper in a house whose foundation is crumbling in.
I think a lot of people suffer because words like “tradition” and “culture” read like “hands-off our nastiness, we’ll do what we want because we always have”. Think of honest-to-God cults that operate right here in the US! People like (fill in the blank, you’ve heard of some), living in their compounds and raising their children knowing nothing else but the fear and hatefulness beaten in to them. Try to talk about how awful that is to a lot of people and what you get is “respect their tradition, they have a right to do what they want, it’s their choice”. But is it? If you grow up without any clue that you have the rights granted to everyone, that most of us take for granted, do you have a choice? Then people will say “they could leave if they wanted”. Really? Some girl made pregnant at 15 or young boy working in hopes of earning enough to someday be able to buy the enlightenment the cult he was born into promises. We pretend that with no education, no job, no contacts, no nothing but the words of their insane-thinking role models ringing in their heads and real promises that they will never see their blood relatives again, they could leave? With a community surrounding them sympathetic to the cult ready to take them home? They might as well be in Iran, they would probably be better off.
Two American Psychologists discovered something called “Learned Helplessness” back in the 60’s through some brutal experiments on dogs. They would shock the dogs in boxes; some were given escape routes that led to boxes where they wouldn’t be shocked, some just got shocked no matter where they went. What they found was that overwhelming majority of the dogs that just kept getting shocked would stop trying to escape their punishment, even when they were provided with accessible escape routes later on, learned helplessness.
With our wonderful tradition of freedom of religion, we look the other way while children are raised in mental shock-boxes so we can conveniently say “if it were that bad, they would leave”, “we might not agree with their traditions, but we HAVE TO respect them”. I get in trouble all the time with people because I won’t, I can’t. I can’t even stomach the dog experiment but if we can connect with our own empathic core enough to see through walls of tradition down into the learned helplessness, those poor dogs suffered in vain, and human souls will continue to suffer as people trying to do the “right thing” and be good with all the right and proper attitudes look the other way. We have learned helplessness too. If we are so hog-tied by our own convoluted “laws” that we can’t see any way of helping people who will never have the rights our country claims to grant with these laws, we’ve got to justify why things are like they are.
I know what the next huffy traditionalist would spout at me after this spew (they’re sadly predictable), “Well, what do YOU think could be done about this?”, or the ever popular “What gives YOU the right to think you could dictate their lives?”, or the “I don’t know where to start! You don’t even believe in freedom of religion!” Yea, they can’t arrest me for speaking up but they sure try their worn out tactics to shut up dissension. I’m doing what I would do every time I talk about it. No solution can ever be found if people can’t talk past the verbiage used to try to humiliate others into silence to support the status quo. I get so tired of hurt. The first step in consciousness on this, in my opinion, is to take the individual responsibility to see the defects inherent in respecting anything because “that’s the way it’s always been”. To dismiss someone’s pain as self-induced when they were born into it, or even conned into it during a vulnerable moment. Take the responsibility to say that something just isn’t right and keep saying it even if it would take all the powers in the Universe, known and unknown, to ever change it even long after we’re all dead and dust. 
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