As much as I hate to say it, Pottersville may be moving down south to Florida and that’s going to require some help. More details here.

God, I love being part of the entitled 47%.

What makes us human is taking care of the less fortunate and those who cannot take care of themselves. We are the only species that does this and it is a key to our success as a species. It appears late in our evolutionary history, with archaic Homo sapiens like Neanderthal, and is accompanied by a 10-15 year increase in life expectancy for everyone. In modern mobile forager groups, those most like our paleolithic ancestors, sharing is mandatory and as long as anyone has something, no one goes without.

Beautifully presented, Allison. Thanks for this.

I recently read an email from someone congratulating a young woman for having fine success in an architecture contest…. saying that she did it all herself…. never acknowledging her wonderful public school education, her state university education… all of which enabled her innate talent to grow and mature. The attack on the public schools is just hideous these days.

Yes, we are in this together and the narcissists need to be brought up short.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling frustrated by the selfishness of old whites (a clan of which I happen to be able to join…. were I to wish to), I want to say, “Dudes, don’t you know that the CNAs in the old folks home are going to be the kids that you are trashing today???? Get a damned clue! We are REALLY all in this together. Be kind.”

We have lost a lot of things in this country but I think the most important loss is the ability to feel empathy. It certainly wasn’t always like this.

my sister who has no kids was like that- “why should i have to pay taxes for schools” she would ask; serioulys

If’n I’m gonna be eaten by the next generation I believe it’s important that they have a good understanding of home economics and a healthy diet. We used to be taught that back in the day. /s

It seems that we’re in a period where people don’t understand that we don’t get to choose which part of the common good we get to pay for. Were that true, I’d choose not to pay for war, but no one gave me that choice. Perhaps your sister is willing to pay her share for war, for roads, for water supply but not for education. I, well I’m willing to pay my fair share for the good of all people. Stupid, I guess.

I’ve been saying for a long time that my first clue (though I didn’t realize it, of course) to the path we’ve been on for the last 30 years, was at a dinner party of older folks (I was then in my late 30′s), friends of my parents, when one woman said, with some fierceness, that her kids were long out of school and grown up, and since that was so, why should she have to pay taxes for schools now?
My jaw dropped with astonishment.I’d never heard anyone express such an idea, and I couldn’t argue because they were my parents’ friends and I didn’t really know them.
Unfortunately, it seems we’ve been on a roll downhill since then.

So true, Dearie! Nice to see you! Now, of course, I gotta run…off to bed. Couldn’t resist the topic though.

MANUFACTURING CONSENT – TAKING THE RISK OUT OF DEMOCRACY:Remember to cautious in “believing polls”. It could be just fabricated to change public opinion. . . . especially possible in this case.

Regarding Unions, Labor, Public Opinion, I just finished a wonderful book that explains “manufacturing consent”. The Book is a collection of papers by Alex Carey called “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy”. It discusses the history of how the public is being manipulated by our ‘owners’. Noam Chomsky recommends it highly. Take the time to read it. Buy two copies. . one for you and your friends. Very Important insights. Should be required OWS reading. kc

One more thing about privatization – online you can watch “Catastroika” about privatization. And “Debtocracy” for free. .. . . tell your friends!
Include ‘english subtitles in your search. Both are 90 minutes but well worth the time. Watch with a friend. kc

Hey, Tejana, nice to be on a thread with you. Yes, it’s stunning and shameful that people forget the common good. We don’t, unfortunately, have any good leaders on our side who remind people of what community is actually all about. And the right just keeps slamming some Ayn Randianism at every opportunity.

Allison, thanks so much for the article. Your expressiveness makes your ideas unforgettable.

We live in a society. We live in a community, no matter how small or great the distance between our homes. What happens to you can happen to me. What I can do to you, you can do to me. And it is imperative upon us all to recognize that we are not making ourselves better when we give ourselves a pass to not give a shit about education if we don’t have kids, or poverty if we’re not poor, or health care if we’re not sick, or work if we’re retired, or retirement if we’re young. We can’t lop off parts of ourselves and then wonder why we’re not whole.

That’s not charity. It’s not even morality. It’s how we survive. We do better when we all do better, because we’re going to be every age sometime, and have every problem eventually, and our only hope is that we take care of each other, and quit deciding we don’t have to be responsible for what no longer matches our reflection in the mirror.

YES!

“If my neighbors are poor and desperate and uneducated, I’m not safe, because poor and desperate and uneducated people do stupid shit and eventually that stupid shit lands on my doorstep.” Etc.

Brilliant, Hantschel!

Fear is empathy’s Kryptonite. The more of the former, the less of the latter. The loss of community, the social contract, unions, reciprocal altruism, and just the general idea that we are all in this thing together is the price of being scared shitless as a nation for the last 70 years of perpetual war.

“We are the only species that does this and it is a key to our success as a species.”

Actually we are not alone in this behavior. I recommend viewing Tom Shadyac’s “I AM”, for some fascinating examples.

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Charles Darwin

Thanks for stepping up with this…. I would never contradict Dr.Dick, but I do believe that elephants are quite collaborative and empathetic. I don’t think we humans are all that special. And when we go bad, we seem to go way bad. And we seem to be in a going-bad period. Hope we can find our way out of this tunnel of gloom and doom and bash and smash.

PS: I am forever grateful for the public school teachers who gave a sense of stability to the 1950s life I was growing up in. Greatest generation, my ass.

It’s all a very narrow, short-sighted, false economy that believes that if someone is not directly and immediately effected that they shouldn’t pay the cost. How does one become an adult without realizing that things are connected to other things; that one’s life is connected to the lives of others? We all have to pay for our existence, both collectively and as individuals, one way or the other. We can pay up front in positive ways, like schools, and jobs, and health care. Or we can pay less efficiently in negative, retrograde ways, like prisons, and cops, and soldiers.

Someone assured me on an earlier thread that ChiTeach are winning the publicity war. Is that not true?

Well, there you nailed it. There is profit to be made in prisons and mercenaries and such. Not so much in teachers and nurses. Though the zombies are certainly going after the school money, of course. I do wish we had a spokesperson on the left…. someone who would really step up. But I do understand………..

” I don’t think we humans are all that special”

Actually we are quite special but probably not in the way you are thinking. We are the only species that strives to accumulate more than we need and willfully kills our own species in that pursuit.

Even if the teachers are loved and respected and fought for, they are up against Rahm and the powers that be. Wish I were still there to step up for them.

In terms of collaboration between individuals, homosexuality plays a significant role in the survival of many, many species.

I don’t know anything about that, but I’m willing to learn. I just know that elephants do seem to take care of their own…. and to truly care. Humans seem to think that they are so special….. I just don’t see it!

…We do better when we all do better…

That’s how you really float all boats…!

Aloha, Allison and ln pups…! I just got home from ‘celebrating’ Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary with Occupy Hilo…! ;-)

Of course I don’t think elephants are distracted by religion and crap like that.

Ah, yes. The extraction of ever-increasing excess profit is trumping the collective good.

I think that television, as a for-profit industry, nearly negates the possibility of a public spokesperson who is outside the profit paradigm. So we all have to that person ourselves. “There’ll be no saviors any soon coming down, And anyway illuminations never come from the crowned.” –Eugene Hutz

That was my reason for asking.

Kumbayah & all that.

Lefties are sooo prone to falsely express hope as a reality.

My current frustration with lefties is their starry-eyed indifference to face up to the huge magnitude of the problem.

I do so understand. But I also understand, from my experience of just chatting with friends, that there is an absence of some kind of organizing force that gives a sense of direction to those who know what they know but don’t know what to do with/about it. You know?

‘Starry-eyed Indifference’ Huh, eCAHN…?

Well, you won’t get any argument from me on humans being special. :)

I’m sorry that I can’t remember the sources for homosexuality among primates. It’s been too long ago. Joan Roughgarden’s “Evolution’s Rainbow” is a good one, though.

Yep. My own experience with lefties is that they mean well but don’t know what to do about it. It isn’t just kumbayah… it’s WTF!? And, it’s how do we fix this mess???? I, for example, went to an OWS meeting in Oxnard (more than just a pretty name) California…. and found out that it was being run by MoveOn…. and that all of us who showed up (over 100 people who were deeply interested) were being distracted ………. and we were quickly sloughed off. There is a sense of futility and distraction that I’ve never seen in my six decades.

How often have you seen typed on this blog that liberalism has truth or evidence on its side. I haven’t kept count but the A is: a lot.

That is just an excuse, an avoidance technique. That’s the starry-eyed.

If truth were relevant lefties would be winning.

Instead they’re losing badly.

That’s the indifference.

If lefties cared, they would first face reality.

The indifference is not that lefties don’t know what to do about it. The indifference is that lefties look for every excuse to avoid even asking the Qs that might lead to productive activities rather than online whining.

I’m new to political activism and glommed onto FDL bc it was allegedly an activist website.

After many years (slow learner) I finally figured out that leftie activism hasn’t worked and the hard Qs about why aren’t being asked.

I suppose the good news is that that the US is pathological and recognized throughout the world as such. I think this is because her exceptional resource endowment plus the ability to exploit it provided a free ride for two hundred years. The ride is over and people are still in deep denial, thinking they can still make it on their own. It was never true they could, but the free gift of nature mzade it seem so. People who always had less to work with know better.

I hear you.

And, hey, if you find a better place, please give me a heads up. I’m tired of being tired of it all!

Upper class lefties are too comfortable and have too much to lose to be effective. They just want to feel good. As you know, there is no free lunch. You have to sacrifice for social justice. Nobody really wants to.

Heh.

I’ve been on the lookout for a better place for awhile.

Thought it might be France.

Then there was Sarkozy. Followed by Hollande. Who seems to be an Obama, only worse in the sense of being several degrees dumber.

But, my way of thinking about it is to look for a better place only for purposes of finding a model, not a place to live. (Latter would be nice though.)

Haven’t come up with anything yet.

There is always that.

On the middle of the leftie economic spectrum is the: let’s all eat organic & grow our own food.

If you type against that as impractical, you meet with a noticeable chill.

No poor peeps represented on threads as the cost of the medium excludes them, as does their necessity to work long hours that they don’t have time to whine online.

Knut,

Other issue is what has worked in the past to further social justice.

I’m early in the learning stage & reading bio of Garrison as one place to look for clues.

Nothing much to offer yet, except that he took strategic view and what I observe on the left today is tactical.

IOW thinking outloud outtyped, Garrison made a moral case against slavery and stuck to it for over 30 years of failure to effect visible change, while effecting underlying change in attitudes about slavery.

If I could identify a Garrison today, I’d leap onto his case and figure out what I could do to further it.

Instead all I see is lesser-evilism. Garrison was eloquent on the immorality of that path.

I know. Maybe that organizing force is just gone, gone the way of the unions? Maybe one will just have to wait until the current hard right tack crashes and burns and something new materializes?

“After many years (slow learner) I finally figured out that leftie activism hasn’t worked and the hard Qs about why aren’t being asked.”

Sacrifice is a dirty word in US culture, even among what passes for the left and especially among Liberals. And the willingness to sacrifice is directly related to our sense of collective well being. I don’t think the vast majority of citizens of any political stripe want to give up the material benefits of the empire, no matter how much their speech rails against it. It’s probably why we don’t have public transportation, or renewable energy sources, or domestic industrial production worth a damn. A critical mass of us don’t want to stop over-consuming, or stop letting the TV tell us what to think, or stop waving the flag. To do otherwise seems too painful. A citizen–or hell, just a human being–has to DO something. And I hear just as many Liberals as Conservatives in the US saying, “Where’s our Leader that I might follow?” The US is a very passive, atomized place where we imagine that a solution can simply be consumed . . . ?

“On the middle of the leftie economic spectrum is the: let’s all eat organic & grow our own food.”

The kernel of this idea can be effective. But what it requires is doing it collectively and for the benefit of others, especially to include those who have little option but to work two less-than-full-time jobs to make ends meet with those who have privilege or advantage giving something up for the sake of the improved quality of life of the community. When this tactic is followed individually, what other lives are impacted? And other lives have to be impacted or the changes and improved quality of life that is supposed to be the goal can’t be attained.

The reason why the U.S. public transportation is such a mess has nothing to do with sacrifice. Quite the contrary. It has everything to do with priorities and ways 1%ers can make money.

Not enough graft in public works anymore….

“It has everything to do with priorities and ways 1%ers can make money.”

And for most of the rest of us as well. Which is the point about its relation to sacrifice. Personal profit–and for a lot more than just the 1%–throws trump to the detriment of the collective good.

Paying for public schools is not something that liberals should pat themselves on the back over, or that conservatives should bemoam their so-called sacrifice for the peons.

Public schools, healthcare for all, free water and childcare, free police and fire protection are human rights for all and financial obligations for most, not charity.

When we allow ourselves to move from rights to munificent expression, we denigrate everyone who goes to public school, acting though they were some lower animal, compared to people lucky enough to have more money.

The American Indian had it right. The goal was to have five horses. If you had more than five, you were obligated to give away the excess to people who didn’t have five.