athena
athena's JournalI'm the one painting with a broad brush?
It looks like you've completely bought Reagan's arguments about "self-sufficiency." I will not even go into what those arguments, in the end, boil down to, since it's too ugly for words.
I sincerely hope, for your sake, that you don't ever fall into depression. Of course, that will mean that you will never understand how a person suffering from even moderate depression feels -- how they would rather die than live another day but their annoying self-preservation instinct prevents them from going through with one of their many suicide fantasies; how they wake up every day, try for hours to get out of bed, finally manage to make it to the door of of their dwelling, but cannot face the daylight and walk back inside to crawl under the covers in a futile attempt to hide from the world and their obligations. If you met such a person, perhaps at the grocery store, you wouldn't have the slightest clue that they were depressed; the smile on their face while they spoke with you would give you the superficial impression that they were perfectly all right. You would probably look down on them for not earning a living and making something of themselves. After all, most people are simply incapable of feeling (or refuse to feel) empathy, which means they only understand a situation if they themselves live through it. No wonder this country is so messed up. No wonder people elected a hateful fearmonger over someone who was advocating love, kindness, understanding, and empathy.
True love and kindness are to be found in a person who gives freely, understanding that s/he cannot possibly know enough about the situation someone else is in to be able to pass judgment.
In the end, your belief that a human being would choose to live off the government or others' charitable acts, and refuse to work out of sheer laziness, reveals a deeply negative view of the human spirit. I happen to know that productivity comes from health and well-being. If there is no productivity, what is to blame is not laziness but a lack of health and well-being. There is therefore no difference between an organization that feeds the hungry and an organization that trains the unemployed for the workforce. The only difference is the relative health and well-being of the people being helped.
When you give, you shouldn't expect something in return.
That is what I have a problem with. When you give someone a gift, with the expectation that they use what you've given them in order to become self-sufficient, you are trying to control them. What if they don't want to become self-sufficient? Are they less worthy as a human being than someone who does want to become self-sufficient? Are you going to let them starve to death because they are not mentally well enough to want a job?
This is why I have a problem with everyone who complains that they gave a beggar on the street some money, which the beggar then used to buy drugs or alcohol. When you give something freely, you do not tell the recipient what they are supposed to do with your gift.
I stand by my statement that the highest form of giving is taxes. In a healthy society that believes in helping those in need, taxes ensure that people don't need charity to go to college or to get treatment for drug addiction or depression. It is a sign of a very sick society that we are having this discussion at all. In a healthy society, the OP would not have existed because no one would have been hungry on Thanksgiving day.
I think it reeks of control.
How do you even give something to someone that makes them self-sufficient? How arrogant to think that one could be so powerful!
If we're talking here about giving to a fund that helps poor young people afford a college education, then I'm all for that. But giving to a soup kitchen or a charity that helps those who are addicted to drugs is in no way inferior to that.
Indeed, I would say that the highest form of giving is taxes. Taxes are supposed to be the basis of the social contract that ensures that everyone is helped. Taxes are supposed to ensure that everyone has a good education, a roof over their head, enough to eat, a police force that protects them, and safe roads and bridges that enable them to do what they want to do more easily. Instead, Americans love to complain about having to pay taxes, or brag about how they avoid paying them, while choosing to give to their favorite charity a much smaller amount to do something good for only those people they choose to help.
Exactly! And beautifully stated!
The reason most white women voted against Hillary is the same reason most white men voted against Hillary: misogyny. Women are just as misogynistic as men are. Those who think that women can't be misogynists do not understand what misogyny is.
This is exactly right. This is why one doesn't see the same sort of solidarity among women as one does among members of other minority groups. Many women are very conflicted about feminism and equality. They accept what patriarchy has taught them about their own inferiority because it gives them a feeling of security.
The idea of being lead by a woman makes many women extremely uncomfortable because it challenges their notions of men's and women's roles in society. Rather than admit that they have been held back by society's sexism, they would prefer to think that women are naturally inferior. A woman who is the equal of men in ambition, intelligence, capability, and courage seems completely wrong to them: there must be something unnatural and evil about the woman that she is hiding from them.
We're living in the new Gilded Age.
We've allowed this to happen. We've become a country where wealth is considered the only indicator of worth. When the top hedge fund manager earns more in fifteen minutes than the average physician or teacher or professor does in a year, you can no longer pretend to be a country that values anything other than wealth.
Reference:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceos-vs-hedge-fund-managers-144938007.html
According to this article, the two top hedge fund managers each made $1.7 billion in 2015. If you assume a 40-hour work week and 52 weeks of work a year (i.e., no vacations), that's $817,308 an hour. Yes, you read that correctly: almost a million dollars an hour. I'm sure these people take vacations, though. And no one really works more than 40 hours a week except for brief spurts that are difficult to maintain in the long run. So this is, if anything, a conservative calculation.
Even if we assumed that these people are so brilliant that they can be considered to be working 24 hours each day, including in their sleep, they would still be making $193,931 an hour. That's more than the average teacher, professor, or physician makes in a year.
Calling is much better than e-mailing.
Take a look at this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/contacting-your-congressional-representative_us_582a0965e4b060adb56f8e95
Margaret Thatcher was not an American president.
Please don't pretend that the United States is not a more macho country than the U.K.
As for Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle, neither of them ever got close to winning the presidency. Hillary was very popular when she was a Senator and when she was Secretary of State. It's when she campaigned for a new office that she became unpopular.
http://qz.com/624346/america-loves-women-like-hillary-clinton-as-long-as-theyre-not-asking-for-a-promotion/
We beg Clinton to run, and then accuse her of feeling “entitled” to win. Several feminist writers have analyzed the Clinton yo-yo. Melissa McEwan sees a deliberate pattern of humiliation, which involves “building [Clinton] up and pressuring her to take on increasingly prominent public challenges, only to immediately turn on her and unleash breathtaking misogyny against her when she steps up to the plate.”
If you find this hypothesis unlikely, there’s Ann Friedman’s explanation: Clinton makes people uncomfortable by succeeding too visibly. Clinton is trapped in “the catch-22 of female ambition,” Friedman writes: “To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.”
It’s not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself. Yet it seems odd that even when Clinton ascends to ever-greater positions of power—from first lady to senator, from senator to secretary of state—we start liking her again once she’s landed the job. It’s not her success that seems to arouse ire, but the act of campaigning itself.
Misogyny is the reason why she lost.
Without misogyny, she would have won in a landslide.
Too many people in this country, male and female, are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of the most powerful country in the world being lead by a woman. We are not as advanced and open-minded as we think we are. We still see powerful women as witches. We still think something must be wrong with a woman who is ambitious. We still hate women. We still want to live in a world where women go out of their way to reassure all of us that they accept their second-class status; we all love women who make it clear that they are not interested in challenging the status quo.
Election day was a heart-breaking day for women everywhere. It has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that everyone, male or female, sees women as second-class citizens.
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