Why do we fall into this trap of comparing group suffering? Anguish is experienced on an individual basis and it is all beyond comparison. Is the torment of the Jews in any way lessened by the slaughter of the millions by the Communist regimes? (And I say that as a member of the Left.)
Ellis Dee, it was kind of you to rethink some of your statements. I fully understand your pride in New England and I spent a lot of my life dreaming of living there.
I’ve been in areas of the South that were boring and even tacky. In the winter parts of it can look a little bare and desolate. But in some states the pines and the palms stay pretty.
New England is not dependent on agriculture so much. The area is much smaller. Since the South and Mid-west are much larger, naturally we’re going to have more of those “mind-numbing” spaces. There is not much excitement in a barren field in winter.
And sometimes what is boring to one is beautiful to another. (I don’t like deserts, for example, but one of my friends thrives on them.)
I am sorry that you felt that we were condescending. I don’t know what it was that we said that made you feel that. In several recent threads – actually, often at SDMB-- Dopers feel comfortable in ridiculing Southerners and in stereotyping them. And it’s not just here. It’s everywhere we go. We are considered yokels. We experience the condescension you were feeling as an almost daily part of our lives.
This thread was not about how superior we are. It is about how we are not as bad as everyone tries to make us out to be.
(BTW, this view of Southerners cannot be blamed entirely on non-Southerners. It is being perpetuated in our humor and I laugh along with everyone else.)
Also, in a tie for my 2nd favorite place in the U.S. is Concord, Mass.
Well, certainly this week I would imagine. (I’m moving to Tuscaloosa in January- THANK GOD there’ll be a 9 month respite from de fooseball- I’m a FB neutral who graduated from and has now gone to work for U of AL and I’m from a family so rabidly Auburnite [since before the days of Shug Jordan] that my sister actually hired a guy in a moving van to drive around Terry Bowden’s block a few years ago to give him the hint it was time to go- my mother has finally uncomfortably accepted my gayness, but I doubt she’ll ever accept my Crimson-ness.)
Your mother’s position is very understandable. Gay’s ok, it’s just the way things are. But the crimson is a deliberate choice you have made. Shame on you, Sampiro!
I’ve been observing here for a couple of hours, and I feel compelled to say a few words…
I was born in California, grew up in Alabama, attended college in Europe, spent most of my career in New York City, and recently retired to New Orleans…with several stops in between.
Guess what I learned?
People are the same all over. You have a certain percentage of nice folks in any given location, and a certain percentage of assholes.
I believe the asshole factor is a consistent all over the world…much as it is in this forum.
They’ll denounce you, though, for trivializing the living death of slavery and the hopelessness of institutionalized racism. You’re like the guy who thinks he’s doing a man a favor by feeding him turds — you reckon that it’s better than being hungry.
I said comparisons to the Jewish Holocaust were inaccurate, and melodramatic, on the basis that the American institution of slavery was never based upon the premeditated extermination of the negro.
If you wish to discuss all the other ways the institution was bad, evil & wrong, I think you’ll quickly get a concensus from just about everyone (including me).
As my posting history will show, I have the deepest respect for civil rights, and the overall human struggle for same.
My one and only stated position on reparations was that African-Americans don’t deserve reparations for slavery; that was a legal (however loathesome) practice.
They deserve reparations for geographic, political, educational, professional and financial exclusion from mainstream American culture for over a century since Appomattox.
I alluded that I thought the Native American has a more legitimate claim to grievances than the African American; historically, Jews have gotten the dirtiest end of the stick (just about wherever they were) for well over a millenia.
And quite honestly, I don’t think any of those positions are cause for abuse.
I didn’t say you did. It’s like you’re speed reading or something. “The living death of slavery” is a metaphor about slavery, not a statement about death.
But you’re zeroing in on one particular element and saying it does not compare. You’re ignoring that Dio was not comparing that element, but rather the element of scope — that is, both the Jewish Holocaust and American slavery were broad and oppressive in scope, covering a whole group of people based on race.
Well, we’ll see.
I’m sure you do. But slavery was not just an abridgment of so-called civil rights; it was an abridgment of humanity. Those people weren’t even recognized as fully human.
I agree with your position, but for a different reason. Fuck the law; the practice was unethical. But it is not the responsibility of a son for what his father did unless he was complicit with his father.
Bullshit. From whom?
Those who always have gotten (and still get) the shit end of the stick are those with the least political clout. It has included people of all races and ethnicities. Poor white people in Appalachia have had it just as tough as anyone. Nobody cares. Nobody bothers. They die young, toothless, penniless, and shriveled. And while they live, it is nothing but struggle from day to day.
jester5150: People are the same all over.
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And my husband is quite a joker. We’re even.
The concept that all people are basically the same is hard for some to realize, I think. They get lost in cultural differences and are blinded to the essentials.
So true. I can appreciate desert beauty, although it’s more of a “nice to visit” type of appreciation. Just my opinion, but deserts make me think of death, or at very least, lifelessness. Not that deserts aren’t teeming with life, just that much of it is hidden to the naked eye.
Fair enough. What really got my goat was the “Bless your heart” soon after the explanation that “Bless your heart” was a grave insult.
As far as beautiful areas of the country are concerned, I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’d probably have to rank New England below some areas in the Northwest. I’ve never been to that area, but everything I’ve seen in movies and pictures from states like Montana and Idaho blows me away. (In particular I’m thinking of that Redford movie with fishing in a river, whatever that was called.)
A River Runs Through It! It’s one of my favorites. I swear, I actually went out and bought books on fly fishing after seeing that. I’ve never been west either…and never quite got around to fly fishing.
As the song says, “There’s such a lot of world to see…”
