Baltimorei

[LDAHL]

catherine........I respect your view of things, but I don't have a great need to feel that I'm in any way connected to certain other people. The human race, as far as I'm concerned has done nothing but destroy things. I think we're a mutation, a blight upon this beautiful earth. It's as if we don't even belong here.

How sad for you. I feel quite differently. There are a lot of great things to say about the human race. The Jupiter Symphony. Single malt scotch. Wrigley Field. The Bill of Rights. The Maltese Falcon. A flag on the moon. The coalition against the Nazis. The Red Cross. Little kids playing fair. Poker. The Alpha Romeo Spider Veloce. NATO. Pretzels. Lincoln's Second Inaugural. The Pieta. The Grand Slam at Denny's. You may be right. We may be a filthy pestilence hurtling toward a well-deserved oblivion, but you've got to admit it's been a Hell of a ride.

[LDAHL]

I don't mean to condemn the people.. I really don't. I like people! What I object to is the system (political/media/corporatocracy) that only works by "encouraging" people to want more, buy more, aspire to more while we kill the planet and incur vast inequalities in the process.

I would maintain that people are not empty vessels waiting for "the system" to tell them what they want. The great majority opt out of pure getting and consuming in favor of other priorities. I'd rather live in a world that tolerates the distasteful grasping of hedge fund managers, power forwards or the Clintons than one where official or unofficial moral scolds can tell me how to live.

[gimmethesimplelife]

What I am saying catherine, is that I think our primitive wiring IS set up for "Them versus us" in many instances. Like racial profiling........If you have the same "type" of person who tends to act a certain way, you'd be naive to not have that filed in the back of your mind as something you should be cautious/distrustful of. I like my primitive wiring.....it keeps me safe/alive. But I realize that to be "civilized" we have to try to rise above those leanings. (whether good or bad).

I'm sorry if I'm rambling. I know what I say sounds totally unhelpful and negative..........I'm just saying that I think our problems have more to do with our primitive hard-wiring that we constantly try to deny.
I have no clue how to handle the present black situation. All I know is that I'm decent to people. I'm decent to the black people I come across during the day. I might dislike how they act, carry themselves, talk, etc., but I'm decent to them. But I'm very uncomfortable with the culture a lot of them have around here. And when you see a certain type of people causing lots of problems over and over and over, and multiplying in numbers much faster than the reasonable people, it can be very disconcerting.

I believe there is something to what you say. There have been instances when I have been walking home late at night and the police have driven by me very slowly but not stopped and I've always believed that I don't get hassled because I have white skin. I very much believe if I were black or Latino i'd be much more likely to be hassled. How do we change how police officers instinctively think, though? I have posted time and time again of instant pension loss as a way to effect change but maybe if this is hard wired in us, instant pension loss for officers crossing the line won't help either. I know I am hard wired to fear authority and after what I have seen/experienced I rather doubt this will ever fully go away. I agree with your statement that this is a very complex issue. Rob

[CathyA]

How sad for you. I feel quite differently. There are a lot of great things to say about the human race. The Jupiter Symphony. Single malt scotch. Wrigley Field. The Bill of Rights. The Maltese Falcon. A flag on the moon. The coalition against the Nazis. The Red Cross. Little kids playing fair. Poker. The Alpha Romeo Spider Veloce. NATO. Pretzels. Lincoln's Second Inaugural. The Pieta. The Grand Slam at Denny's. You may be right. We may be a filthy pestilence hurtling toward a well-deserved oblivion, but you've got to admit it's been a Hell of a ride.

I have LOTS of things of beauty that fill my life....but they're mostly all in nature. Don't be sad for me at all. There are, of course things I enjoy that man has made. But seeing mankind destroy a great friend of mine is hard to watch.

Rob.......I do believe a lot of it IS instinctual, and we're constantly expecting humans to over-ride instinct. Right or wrong/good or bad.......it presents a lot of our present problems.

[Lainey]

It's much more than individual instinct or personality. "Cut Adrift" is a non-fiction book which looks at a number of families on the various parts of the economic spectrum. It was interesting to see how each reacted to the 2008 Great Recession.
Wealthy people reacted by wanting to build a bigger moat between themselves and the next lower group. Poorer/working class people blamed themselves and pulled back their expectations, finally giving up on the American Dream. But as has been said above, what really would work best is for all of us to acknowledge that as a society, "we all do better when we all do better" as the late Paul Wellstone said.

That to me is the American Dream, and that's what is a combination of government policies (G.I. Bill, low-interest college loans, free public school K-12, free/minimal cost basic health care, etc.) and work ethic can provide. If, instead, we spend our treasure ($3 trillion+) in permanent wars, and then blame individuals when there is nothing left for spending on infrastructure, pre-school, clinics, national parks, etc. then all the aphorisms in the world will not stop our societal decline.

[catherine]

I would maintain that people are not empty vessels waiting for "the system" to tell them what they want. The great majority opt out of pure getting and consuming in favor of other priorities. I'd rather live in a world that tolerates the distasteful grasping of hedge fund managers, power forwards or the Clintons than one where official or unofficial moral scolds can tell me how to live.

It's not a question of morality. It's getting to be a question of survival. As Gandhi said: there is enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.

And I believe in free agency, but I'm also realistic about the influence of people who have money and power in our lives.

There are people like us, on this forum, who are happy in our subculture of enough, but there are few of us. As the Scots say, "Wha's Like Us? Damn Few And They're A' Died!"

[catherine]

catherine........I respect your view of things, but I don't have a great need to feel that I'm in any way connected to certain other people. The human race, as far as I'm concerned has done nothing but destroy things. I think we're a mutation, a blight upon this beautiful earth. It's as if we don't even belong here.

I think some differences/conflicts are unsolvable.......which is fine if we can live apart from each other. But we can't.

Yes, you're right--we're all in it together, which is why we need to figure out how we all can drink out of Gregg's watering hole without killing each other.

You could move, if you're not comfortable with the demographics of your city. Move to Vermont. My DS was dating a black girl and a couple of redneck Vermonters pretty much drove her out of a bar like swatting a fly. I love VT and would live there in a minute, but it's astounding to me, a NJ resident with white minority status, that such homogeneity still exists, and such intolerance still exists. (well, I do believe it--I just don't experience it in my own day-to-day life).

[flowerseverywhere]

And there's lots of single white mothers......but they don't tend to have 8 kids that they then ignore.

And I guess I am a racist, since I believe that cultures/peoples from different geographical areas, etc., ARE different.....and very likely in their DNA. And the whole premise of this country is that everyone is the same, and there aren't any differences.

.

yes you are racist. So all white single mothers are nurturing and don't have multiple kids and all black single mothers have 8 kids they ignore. You know this for a fact.

And classifying by a geographical region, race, gender as being smarter or dumber. Wow.

I could not respond to some of these posts for a few days because I was so taken aback. I had a po white mama and a po black father and who knows how different I would have been if I wasn't taken out of that environment. So we were taken out of our home, and neither family wanted us and we were put in middle class foster homes. Guess what. All 5 of us put ourselves through college and helped each other and we had five children between the five of us (every one was born after at least two years of marriage) and we took very good care of them. Imagine that. I don't know what would have been if we stayed in a brawling alcoholic home in the poorest section of town. I don't think the outcome would have been the same. Feeling one set of people is better than the other has led to much genocide and ethnic cleansing in this world.
On a lighter note here is my funny stereotyping story. I volunteer in the library Monday afternoons. I know a guy who grew up in the Deep South. He has bad teeth, talks slowly with a southern drawl I can barely understand, but is pretty quiet. I never thought about it, but I would never had pegged him as an extremely intelligent person. Well he saw me today and we started talking about a book he was getting. We are both history fans and he had tons of info on some great authors. He had a stack of books and the librarian joked to him see you in a few days. Apparently he is a voracious reader, has written many published articles on local history and they are always ordering books from other libraries for him. Stereotypes are so easy to form but they can be far from the truth.

[jp1]

Oh, so we should just let criminals run around loose, because the prisons are already too full? I'm for the death penalty for violent repeaters. Whatever the system is for all the others, there must be a flaw in it......and a flaw in the entire approach by this country.

Cathy, you say lots in your,post that I would like to,respond to. Too much for me to do so as I wait to get on a plane in a few minutes. So I'll start with one thought. Perhaps the flaw is in assuming that incarcerating people in a punitive fashion, as we do, (assuming that they survive long enough to actually get to prison without their spine being broken by thug cops) will achieve changes in behavior. After all, what hope does an ex con have of achieving success in our society. Job applications ask if they've been convicted. Yes convicted? No job for you, thank you very much. They can't even vote in some states, to try and change the leadership causing their oppression. What else should they do to express themselves besides rioting? (Not that I think rioting is the answer, merely that I think it's a logical response to their lot in life.)

There is a tired old statement that insanity is repeating the same thing twice and expecting different outcomes. We've tried more and more punitive punishment for criminals. That hasn't worked in reducing recidivism. Perhaps we should stop the insanity and try something different. I'll be honest that I'm not sure what that different thing is. But if I had to guess I'd guess it looks something like the Harlem Children's Zone.

[iris lilies]

?... Perhaps the flaw is in assuming that incarcerating people in a punitive fashion, as we do,...will achieve changes in behavior....

There is a tired old statement that insanity is repeating the same thing twice and expecting different outcomes. We've tried more and more punitive punishment for criminals. That hasn't worked in reducing recidivism....

jesus Christ, I have to really wonder about ya'll who apparently don't let live in high crime neighborhoods.

jp, I appreciate perps being locked up for however many moments in order to give my community a freaking rest from their shenanigans.

Go forth and and expound on the nature of criminal rehabilitation and restorative justice and etc. It is the internet, after all. But some of us are real people with communities where we look out for one another against the bad guys. Make no mistake, the bad guys are real. Talk amongst yourselves to solve societal problems, it doesn't hurt anything.

of COURSE prison does not rehabilitate anyone! Throwing whatever amount of money at that problem won't work, just like throwing money at poor families and poor communities doesn't fix the problem.