Post
by RebLem » Fri Mar 05, 2010 5:42 am
Closed but not locked--knock hard & I'll look through the peephole.
Having said that, however, I must say that, while I am a liberal on most things, I am conservative about some things. I am aganst the loosening of voter registration restrictions and the expansion of the number of people authorized to register people to vote under HAVA. I agree with the Republicans on the census--that its supposed to be an enumeration, no statistical sampling allowed. And I believe Anita Hill lied about Clarence Thomas--I didn't at first, but as the hearings proceeded, I thought Sen. Orrin Hatch came up with a very convincing theory of how she came up with those accusations.
Sometimes, I find fault in nearly everyone's ideological model. Let me write of two examples. First, sex education. The "abstinence only" people think giving information on birth control to kids gives them permission to have sex. They are wrong, mostly because kids get their values from their parents and their peers, not their teachers very often. Secondly, what the other side is usually saying is something my father and his father said to each other when I was a child in the 40's and 50's, in such a way that they left the distinct impression it was an old, long standing, family joke. Upon parting at the end of a visit, one or the other would say, "Well, be good. But if you can't be good, be careful." I suspect this is a joke which is not unique to my family. Did yours have it, too?
The other side is wrong, too. They want to dispense birth control information on the presumption that it will lead to markedly fewer pregnancies. Thirty one years as a public aid caseworker dealing with pregnant, unmarried teens for all but six of them has taught me that the vast majority of teens who get pregnant did so because they wanted to get pregnant. They are kids with neglectful parents, or, more often, just a neglectful mother and an absent father who think a child will love them. A young man is just one of those unpleasant things like labor pains you have to put up with for a while to get a baby. And, if they are at all churched, and a sizable number are, there is another reason. They go to church on Sunday and get completely ignored, even pushed around, as 6, 7, 8, 9 year olds. But at the end of the service, they see all the blue-haired ladies make a beeline for the newest, youngest mother in the congregation. Then its all smiles and gentleness, and a welcoming into the Sisterhood. A young 12 or 13 year old girl who has never had much attention from her mother or female relatives or the older women in her church finds that welcoming enormously seductive. She craves it, and will do what she has to do to get it.
A third way, the one which has, in my view, the most promise, has been gaining some ground in recent years. Dolls have been developed which mimic in many ways, the behavior of a newborn child. Young, at risk teens are given these ydolls, and they then learn that a baby doesn't love anyone. A baby does four things--it eats and cries, and poops and pees. That's it. Nothing else. It doesn't give anything. It only takes, or seeks to. It can be enormously draining for young people who are totally unprepared for it. And, they learn, before it is too late.
Now, another thing in a totally different area, international macro behavior. Right wingers see Third World leaders nationalizing industries, and think they are operating on the same sort of tired, proven wrong models as European Communist parties--you seize the means of production to end capitalist greed and exploitation of workers. But what right wingers do not understand is that Third World leaders nationalize industries for totally different reasons. They have populations with a strong Libertarian streak in them, who resent being taxed by the government because they are poor and can't afford to pay. So, Third World leaders turn to socialism as a way of insuring an independent income stream for government operations so they don't have to bother the common folk for the money to sustain government operations. This is something right wingers just do not seem to understand, and their approaches are doomed to failure until they do.
Don't drink and drive. You might spill it.--J. Eugene Baker, aka my late father
"We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."--Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S. Carolina.
"Racism is America's Original Sin."--Francis Cardinal George, former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago.
Have you ever changed a strongly held opinion? How did that happen? Do you engage in dialogue (not shouting matches) with people who hold views very different from your own? Do those people influence your thinking? Do you influence their thinking? 
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