Alan Keyes vs. Barack Obama?

Agree to disagree

It is obvious that you and I are not going to agree. But, I think you need to know that as eloquent and well put together as your argument is, it is based on many assumptions that are not true. Further, I appreciate your sincere consideration for those less fortunate that you. All I am saying is that along my journey from the streets, where my "generous", but poor parents (Father a pimp...mother partied every nite leaving us alone, and did "whatever" to pay the bills), did NOTHING but teach me how I did not want to be, I have learned that I was looking at life the wrong way. I used to look to blame everyone for my woes. I WAS angry at the white man. I was insensed at the atrocities that I heard of and witnessed. But, I recently (in the past ten years) realized that the democratic promises are merely that.....promises. There is always an emotional plea, and it seemed that Dems are "for" black people. But the policies have not worked. The DO promote laziness. In my earlier conversation with that woman from E St. Louis, she told me that she did not want her job to pay that well because it would jeopardize her state aid. Now (3 years and many trips 3 miles away to E St. Louis later) she thanks me for showing her the light. BTW she is now enrolled at TUI and and has filled out her FAFSA 2 times. While still on aide, she has a great job, and is looking forward to making so much money she will not qualify for aide.


Yes.....I am empowered. But, it has nothing to do with my parents, or any govt program. Rather, I was released from my chains of of liberal emotional warfare. I say again. WE (that woman in E St. Louis and I) can do it without your condescending but fancy words of encouragement.


I do not disagree with helping those less fortunate than we are, but I think liberals go about it the wrong way. Instead of trying the keep the slave by showing him how you feed him, doctor him, and give him a shack under which he can lay his head, why don't you set him free? Not free to suffer, but free from your imprisonating policies. Let's educate. Let's give parents school choice. Let's keep taxes low to promote investment. Let's privitize part of social security so that the funds that WE earn can provide some type of decent return, rather than being raided by dogooding liberals who do better for themselves than those they purport to help.



Don't tell me what is best for US until you have walked in OUR shoes.

 

No surprise there.

 

No....you can't provide 5 or 10 URLs that have counters that make sense. you can't even counter one for one.


The test is easy:

Go to www.dnc.org Look at their stances- they say a lot of what they are for....no duh, we are all for that. What will you DO (besides Bush bash)?

Now, go to www.gop.org Look at their stances- oh my gosh---are those proposed solutions? Too bad those don't brainwash!

 

Re: Agree to disagree [Part 1 of 2]

That's not a bad thing, you know. It's how minds get opened -- especially when the disagreeing parties figure out, in spite of it, to work toward common goals.

You know... it's becoming increasingly clear to me that you are very, very, very bright -- I say that from my heart. How is it, then, that you cannot see that you are exceptional -- something I suspected earlier, and which, based on what you just wrote, I now know to be fact. And you'd be exceptional no matter what color your skin was! It colors the glasses through which you see the world -- and, sadly, blinds you, I think, to the inherent commonness of certain others. Like a smoker who becomes an even more strident anti-smoking advocate once he's stopped than he ever would have been had he never smoked in the first place, I fear you're projecting onto millions of others your "stand and deliver" values while ignoring what I know you know about how difficult it is for some to achieve them even when, to us, it seems like that way is clear. It's a very easy thing to do once one has reached certain mountaintops, as you have. With that paradigm shift sometimes comes lost memories of or the inability to see others' barriers and, moreover, the utter helplessness they have over breaching them.

Your father was a pimp. Your mother, I'm guessing, an occasional prostitute, among other things. Obviously, you knew some prostitutes. Think back on them; on how easily they could have just walked away from the life, but didn't... or, more accurately, couldn't. It wasn't the money (though for some it always is). Rather, it's who and where they perceive themselves to be. They've slipped through the cracks, onto the streets, using drugs, turning tricks -- many of them sneaking into the closets of the back or upstairs bedrooms of crack houses at night, hoping no one noticed them, just so they could have half a chance of sleeping for a few hours without being raped by everyone in the house.

While their having gotten there is more likely than not of their own doing and mental/emotional weakness and whatever drug habit they fell into which ultimately cost them their jobs, their apartments and their kids, they are nevertheless where they are and wishing it weren't so won't change that. They have a drug habit they can't kick; a credit record they ruined during their downward slide; multiple unlawful detainers on ther record which they also accumulated during their downward slide and which would keep them from finding a place to live if they could turn everything else around tomorrow. They haven't a prayer of finding work. And until and unless they can get their kids back, none of it's worth the trouble in any case.

Wealthy, white, empowered, Republican men in their shiny SUVs travel to the worst parts of town to pick them up and take them to dark neighborhood school and church parking lots where the women repeat the same humiliating and degrading routine from five to twenty five times a night for as little as ten bucks (depending on how bad the neighborhood is) a blowjob.

They're depressed to the point of near mental illness. They're co-dependant on some pimp or worse. They're infected with every STD known to mankind -- or, worse, HIV. They've been asked not to return to most of the very shelters that could help them most if they'd just allow it. The only way they know how to relate to men -- including men in their lives they are supposed to be able to trust like fathers and uncles -- is using sex (since 90+ percent, from my observation, of these women were sexually abused as children or young girls by family members or other adult male figures in their lives that they were supposed to trust). Every time they've tried to break out, somehow they get pulled back -- often by "friends" who are also in the life and who, like a bucket full of crabs, grab them and pull them back just as it starts to look like they'll make it; but also because of their own weaknesses and inability to perservere when hitting inevitable roadblocks on the way back. And deep in their hearts, most of them know they're not likely to survive long... and they're okay with that.

I invite you to go take your you-can-do-it-if-you-try routine down to those streets and see how many of those women you can sell it to. It's not that they can't fix their problems, or that your methodology for doing so wouldn't work if they'd just up and do it. It's that they cannot even see the methodology, even when you explain it to them. They are, in Zen terms, living the life of the monkey, where there is no time for planning and everything is taken as it comes. It is a purely reactive life where only short-term opportunities are noticed, processed and acted upon, while all else is not merely ignored but, worse, simply unseen... in true blindness. They've seen, done and endured more in this life than any decent human being should ever even have knowledge of, much less experience. Their memories of a "normal" life -- that is if they ever even had one in the first place -- are so distant that they're not even recalled any more. And if there were a way to somehow get them to see themselves in the backyard of a nice house enjoying a family BBQ on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by children and friends, they would consider themselves unworthy and, worse, such a scene would be considered so completely out of reach that it is no different from watching an old episode of Ozzie and Harriet on TV.

People who have normal lives and are empowered by, jobs, families, activities, resources, friends, acquaintances, money, cars, clothing, healthcare, companionship, trust, integrity, truthfulness, honor and a place to live where the wolf isn't knocking at the door every day -- people like that can't even begin imagine how these women see the world, no matter how hard they try. They live in different worlds; completely different paradigms or maybe even dimensions of sorts. Your molehills are their mountains. They have no way of even gaining your perspective in even hypothetical terms. You project onto them values and viewpoints that they simply don't have -- and couldn't have if they tried. The clear path out as seen by the empowered person can't even be envisioned, must less observed, by these women.

Their abilities to navigate in any direction -- even out -- is so thoroughly shaped by the hopelessness of their situation that they would not travel through the opened door of change even if they were standing right in front of it. They couldn't even see it. Empowered people just can't seem to understand that. They see the opened door not because it's there, but because they're empowered. Empowerment gives them choices. That's what empowerment is all about.

People who are not empowered don't see choices. They often can't see choices. That's what lack of empowerment is all about.

The prostitution example is extreme, and by its extremeness may be seen by some as irrelevant to this discussion. But I provide it because one thing everyone, once they envision it, can at least begin to grasp is how an empowered person might project onto these women that which for the empowered person seems so possible and do-able, but for the unempowered person is not even seen, much less considered. With the prostitution example, it's at least possible for empowered people to begin to see the hopelessness of expecting prostituted women to see virtually anything as they see it; and, more importantly, the folley of projecting at all.

Empowered people, like you, projecting onto unempowered people your empowered values and, more importantly, your empowered capabilities -- even when we're only talking about a person like the woman from East St. Louis who isn't a prostitute and who obviously can see the way out -- is equally folley... just to, perhaps, a lesser degree.

Continued in next post...

 

I can certainly live a full life without work. Lots of people my age choose to retire with that kind of money.

 

Re: Agree to disagree [Part 2 of 2]

...continued from previous post

Objection, your honor! Facts not in evidence. What, now you're saying that you know the woman referred to in Mr. Obama's speech and, morever, that her plight is not as he represented? How convenient. Move to strike. Request that counsel be admonished, and that the jury be directed to disregard.

Again, I point out: You're exceptional.

Whoever said "help" would not include showing him how to fish? Whenever "let my people go" is uttered in these modern times, I always wonder why those asking the question don't also ask themselves whose interest is logically served by not doing so.

So that private schools which average families can't afford flourish, while public shools borrow more money to pay for metal detectors.

By only the richest of Americans -- the only ones who are enjoying Republican tax cuts -- and none of whom are going to write you a check for a piece of their earnings, now, are they?

It is Bush who broke his promise to protect the Social Security surplus accumulated under a Democratic presidency; and is looting the Social Security Trust Fund, spending every dime on tax cuts for the wealthy. To cover the cost of his tax cuts, Bush will have to spend the entire projected Social Security surplus of $2.4 trillion from 2005 through 2014. Independent analysis of the President's proposals to privatize Social Security have noted than any such plan would cost at least $1 trillion. Bush has not said where this money would come from. And for your $1 trillion, you get benefit cuts. Bush's own commission on the matter acknowledge in 2001 that "the proposals would have to be accompanied by benefit cuts or other painful steps if the retirement system was to avert a long-term financial crisis." Gimmee a break.

If you only knew the shoes I've walked in. If you only knew. Your life's nightmare doesn't trump mine... as you'd acknowledge, if you only knew.

 

I'm just messin' with ya' Dennis. Relax.

And thanks for posting right in between my two continuation posts, above, so that my "Continued in next post..." notation is not technically accurate. The 75 seconds-between-posts rule bit me in the butt, didn't it?

There's some kind of weird poetic justice, there, I think.... perhaps the Canadian gods' way of getting back to me for my smarmy Candian swipe (meant purely for the humor of it, mind you) that I took in another thread.

When I'm got, I'm got. What can I say.

 

It's 4:45 PM PDT and I have to start getting ready to take a long drive to go meet my partner and his wife for dinner. But you can bet I won't be letting this one go!

Stay tuned...

 

Teddy's speech

did anyone else notice that Teddy Kenedy spoke to the Demorcratic convention on Marry Jos B-Day? I celebrated with a piece of Upside down cake Drowning in a Pond of Chocolate syrup and chased with Irish Whiskey!

 

Re: Re: Agree to disagree [Part 2 of 2]

That's kind of a non-starter, isn't it? John Kerry is far richer than most republicans and he's not writing any checks either.

The problems faced by the disenfranchised, as you describe them, are very diffucult to overcome. How would what Kerry proposes to do actually help them?

 

That poem really hit home.

I grew up amongst the working poor. The first to graduate high school in generations. The first to be accepted into university (was accepted readily into both UBC and SFU, elected to go to SFU). The first to have it all before him and elect to follow another path.

Married for love, young. Spent seven years on welfare (with the provincial govt's more-or-less blessing), to take care of a spouse who was ill. Fed five on less money annually than some people make in bonuses. Burned a lot of midnight oil while on welfare. Learned, on my own, how to be a computer scientist.

Saw a lot of nasty things while on welfare. Nasty, painful things. Know how it feels to be treated by the system.

And after seven years of the most abject poverty a husband and father could submit himself to for the greater good -- built myself up within three years of leaving the dole to a point I was earning more than my stepfather had after some 40 years in the logging trade. Kept climbing, kept building. Reached a point where I was paying more in taxes every year than I'd ever gotten on the dole in a year. Bought a house. Had a platinum credit card, a line of credit -- my checks cleared without delays. Reached a point where I was putting more into the food bank (not a tax deduction) than many people put into their own retirement plans.

And watched it dissolve in a moment. Watched how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. Watched it disappear. Stuff that I had built with my own hands, torn away.

Yeah, that poem hits home.

And built it slowly again. Still working on this. Working 29 hour days. Slowly building. This time, with the benefit of hindsight.

When you climb out of hell, and keep climbing, you can get pretty damned heady. Even arrogant about how others should be able to repeat your feat. After all -- if you did it... and on and on and on.

But I lived amongst the welfare poor for years. I shared bread with these people for years. I was always an outsider, even while inside, but I smelled the breath of it for years. The self-lies. The institutionalized-lies. The whole game.

And when the fall came, after having been out of that for seven years of prosperity -- it was my memory of the smell of the breath of it that kept me fighting, kept me from giving up. It was the knowledge that I had shaken the snakes of that pit that kept me from ever admitting defeat and returning to it.

But there's something I didn't forget. Ever. I was one of the very, very few who can climb out of the pit. So many cannot. I could list the reasons I believe the pit is designed to be nearly impossible to climb out of.

But I won't. I'll let people believe the pit isn't designed that way, just in case they ever get the light in their eyes to try. I don't want to be one to discourage people from trying.

And having lost everything, after having climb so far out, until I was at the lip of that black festering place again, I learned the truth of what a friend of mine once told me:

"Never forget what you've been through, or it will come back to remind you."

Best wishes to anyone who wants out of that place. You should fight as hard as you can to get out of there. Take no prisoners along the way. Get out. Don't look back.

But don't forget what it required of you to do it. Ask yourself if everyone else has that kind of grit. If they don't, then be compassionate about it. Don't let your own success blind you to the reasons for their failure.

Ah, the memories.

 

This thread reminds me of a wonderful Garrison Keillor piece I read a few weeks ago:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4883671.html

Excerpt: "A Democrat knows that the leaf turns and in the human comedy we are one day spectators and the next day performers. The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for years to get your life the way you want it and buy the big house and the time share on Antigua and one afternoon you're run down by a garbage truck and lie in the intersection, dazed, bloodied, your leg unnaturally bent, and suddenly life becomes terribly challenging for six months. In the Prairie Home office, one summer evening a woman walked out the door to go home and was swarmed by wasps and staggered back into the building, bitten so badly that her air passage was swollen half shut. She was almost unconscious, going into shock, and collapsed in the hallway. Luckily, a colleague had stayed late at work and she called 911, and in came the St. Paul paramedics to save Deb's life. Every day at work, I see a bright capable charming woman whose memorial service I might have attended had circumstances been ever so slightly different."

Not sure it's fair to say that only Democrats feel this way (there are Southern Baptist charities in Mississippi that convey this attitude quite well), but I think it is fair to say that this is where the Democratic support of policies like welfare and affirmative action tends to come from. The idea of a welfare state isn't real popular, but people really are slipping through the cracks and we have to do something.


Cheers,

 

:rolls eyes:

Your torrent of self-righteous assumptions and name-calling aside, the question remains "What else do we have to do for her?" Your only suggestion, unless I missed something, was a law to hamstring "empowered-white-men." Since I don't know you, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn't a serious suggestion.

At least I offered to explain to her what a student loan is. I suggest that that would be infinitely more helpful to her than your bombast and sentimentalism.

 

I think that the use of racist and sexist stereotypes undercuts the intended compassion of the rest of your message.

One can always imagine reasons why any constructive action is doomed to fail. But that path is simply a prescription for continued failure.

It's also condescending. It suggests that there's a whole class of benighted people who can only be saved by grace, people who are incapable of successfully accomplishing any life-changing works of their own volition.

You end up treating poor people, or at least those of them who aren't white males, as if they were children or incompetents.

I worked my way through school, attending part time and working part time. Many students do that and there is nothing particularly unusual about it. I often was only a month or two away from not being able to pay my rent.

I don't know what these "empowered-white-man resources" are supposed to be. But I find the gratuitous and stereotypical race and gender insults to be callous.

I place great value on opportunity. I prefer a society that offers everyone, no matter what their race, sex, politics or station in life, an opportunity to grow and to improve. Nobody should ever be trapped in a box without a door. There should always be another viable option available. That's one reason why I like distance learning. It's why I'm a steadfast defender of educational opportunity.

But people have to make the inner-movement of change for themselves. They can't just surrender to a defeatist inertia in which everything is impossible, waiting for some superior power to come into their lives from outside and save them.

There need to be fewer excuses made and more occasions of "here's something that you can do to make your life better".

That's not an unrealistic burden, it's the meaning of freedom.

 

Re: Re: Agree to disagree [Part 1 of 2]

Gregg, I can tell you from personal experience in busting johns that there aren't ANY "wealthy, white, empowered Republicans" in "shiny SUV's" among them. They're mostly lower-middle to upper-middle class men from all races who are married with children and drive non-descript vehicles that are usually a few years old.

You've become so desperate to smear Republicans that you've resorted to talking about something you know absolutely nothing about.

 

As I mentioned, I witnessed the state welfare system (at least in Canada) from the inside for seven years. I smelled its breath and broke bread with it.

The system (the Pit) had absolutely no interest in empowering me to get out of it once I had been in it for some time. None whatsoever. Indeed, some of the things that were done while I was in the pit could only be said to have been (purposely or by accident) designed to keep me there.

The only way I got out of the pit was to fight out of it, screaming and kicking.

Oh, I greatly appreciate (beyond words) that society had such a system in place to assist me in feeding my family while I was dealing with life's Hard Knocks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unappreciative.

But I can assure you that not one person behind the desks did a thing to encourage me to empower myself to get out. In fact, when I expressed a desire to get out, and showed some initiative to get out, my attempts were passively (and sometimes actively) thwarted by any number of means.

After some period of years (I don't know where the line is drawn), human beings are simply written off. It is easier to write off the "lifers" than to encourage them to have some initiative.

I know a man who is 40 years old and has been in the pit since he turned 18. His intelligence is borderline genius. He doesn't like being poor. He's had a hard life, and has issues he has to deal with. But he tries. God, he tries. He wakes up every morning and tries to get out of that damned pit. He faces the same passive obstacles that were placed in front of me, but he hasn't found a way to jump over them. He wants a better life. He dreams dreams. He desires better. But he has been written off so many times that I sometimes think he's written himself off in the process.

Not once in the last 22 years of that man's adult life has the system ever asked him: "How can we empower you to get out of our hold?" The jailer doesn't ask the con, "How can I help you escape?"

I know this so intimately because that lost individual was once a very promising young man, with a good future ahead of him, if he just found his stride, and when I was a kid, that man (then a teen) was a role model for me. Smart, witty, ambitious. Troubled, sure. But ready to take on the world and grab it by the nards and make something of life.

And I've watched as it all fell apart for him.

Someone screwed up -- someone dropped the ball -- someone failed him. I can't believe that he simply failed himself. That would be too convenient a view to take, because it would let me sleep comfortably at night believing that everyone did everything they could do for him, and that "he" simply made too many excuses for himself.

This is a three dimensional issue, flattened onto a convenient two dimensional medium. The missing dimension is lost in the agenda shuffle.

Anyway -- I told myself I was going to get out of my Internet life for good. This particular topic sucked me back in, and for my rant, I apologize.

God bless everyone.

 

I'll give one "fer instance" and then leave it at that.

While still classified as employable, I asked for a monthly bus pass in order to help me move about while looking for work. I was repeatedly told that I was not going to get any such thing.

Doesn't seem like much. A few bucks a month I could have budgeted myself, right? When you have five mouths, though, every penny literally matters.

God how I tried to get them to budget my case for one pass so I could move around the city to hand out resumes.

Never got it.

Then, when I was classed as unemployable due to health reasons (stress related -- who'd have guessed) -- I was ... get this, offered a monthly bus pass because unemployables were entitled to a bus pass in order to get about.

It may not seem like a big obstacle. Probably isn't.

But can you imagine how much and how hard I laughed when, as an "unemployable", I was given the very thing that may have assisted me in finding work?

It's a very well thought out system.

Anyway -- that's enough of that from me.

 

Example of FLIP-FLOP

One changes one's mind about opinions it is called "changing your mind."

One changes one's mind about FACTS it is called "LYING."

Example of "LYING":

While in California:

"I DON'T OWN AN SUV!"

While in Detroit:

"My family owns SEVERAL suv's and everyone of them is AMERICAN MADE!"

More to come, I promise

 

Wiseguy Lutheran notes:

"Saved by grace"...what a concept!





Sorry. Too good to resist. As you were. Bye.

 

What I think is often missing in the debate over social safety nets, is the source of the programs. I don’t think that there are any people of conscious that want to see individuals suffer. Do social programs help more than they hurt? I don’t know. I’ve seen it both ways.

The question where Democrats and Republicans tend to differ, in my view, is should those safety nets come from non-voluntary funds (i.e. your taxes) or from charitable acts of individuals and organizations. Does charity begin at home, or at the point of the IRS bayonet?

Hyperbole aside, not all Democrats are interested in keeping the disenfranchised in perpetual servitude to the nanny state… and not all Republicans are heartless monsters who wouldn’t help a homeless person if their life depended on it. Political ideologies often mask the reality that we, as a society, do not have all of the answers to our problems.

I have been at one time or another a registered member of both major parties (as well as having some strong Libertarian, and God help me, even a few Green policy leanings), but to me, it seems that social assistance should not be a forever thing, and should largely come from individuals… and before anyone asks, yes, I do put my money, time, and concern where my mouth is.

The real answer to helping folks out of poverty is probably in the mix of ideas that have been put forth in this thread… not in a single silver bullet, but in a combination of ideas and practices that help were needed, challenge where required, and address the complexities of individual situations in a manner that hasn’t yet been approached on a broad scale.

Kudos to DesElms and to Dcross for a passionate and intellectually stimulating exchange.

Oh… and back on topic… I’m sure that everyone has heard by now that Keys has officially accepted the nomination. If nothing else, it should be an interesting race to watch.

Cheers, and good wishes to everyone.
Tony Maranto