Ah, people, you compliment me. Dispassionate, I am not a right-wing gun nut or anything like that. Don’t know how you could conclude that. I hate guns with a passion. This type of accusation is about the only thing that I find really insulting here.
Some of you are right about the sloppiness of certain of my posts (spelling, etc.). I am very ashamed of that. Yes, I mean it; I’m not being sarcastic. You are absolutely right. I take great pride in correct spelling and grammar, but, you see, I do this posting stuff on the side while I do other things, and sometimes I’m in a hurry. I don’t bother to proof-read, because my internet time is limited (I have a desk full of work), and if the choice is between making a point and creating a great piece of literature, I will choose the former.
I think I have finally figured out why this whole topic creates such strong reactions. I touched on that yesterday, but not in a very detailed way. It’s the culture, period. The vast majority of Americans are descended from hardship, building-something-out-of nothing, immigrant-sacrifices for their children, bootstraps, fingers worked to the bone and all that bullshit.
So, seeing these concepts attacked, naturally puts many people on the defensive. They take it personally. There is a deeper issue here, however: Those early immigrant days are behind us. If we have such a great nation, why do so many people still live such shitty lives today? In part it is our own fault (as a society at large).
Instead of getting angry and railing against the system to create more parity and fewer of these self-sacrificing heroes, we focus on the “heroes” themselves and elevate them almost to status of saint.
When I was in high school in Europe, I got an after-school job at McDonalds. I wanted to, and many of my friends did. It was to play grown-up, mainly, not for the money. My family was so fucking embarassed, because someone we know might “see” me and think that we “needed the money” or something. They would say, “people will think we are sending you to work to help support the family”. In American culture, that would be seen as somthing to be proud of, in European culture, where the struggling hero phenomenon is almost non-existent, it is an embarrassment. (Needless to say, with my rebellious spirit, I asked for extra hours at McD’s, just to spite my family who was embarrassed by my working there. LOL.)
Why do Americans cling so to elevating the struggling to saintly-hero status, instead of going a few steps further and demand that the system be altered in ways that eliminates the problem (i.e. European-style universal social safety nets)? That is where the right-wingers come in. They are so afraid of “socialism”, they block it and fuck it up every time. (Rember the Hilary/Universal healthcare scandals?) And we, as a society, have sort of resigned ourselves to the “fact” that we cannot change the system, so we place our focus on all the “heroic victims” created by said system instead.
We treat people with diseases, for example, with the same condescension. Yesterday, I came across a copy of “Rosie” magazine. Not usually my type of literature, but there it was. Let me tell you about the Letters page. The first two letters were apparently in response to a story about a cancer patient. They were short letters, combined no more than a dozen short lines. Here is the list of words/phrases that show up in it to the point of making up almost 50% of the two letters:
-most courageous picture
-her spirit and strength
-her battle
-courageously beautiful
-her burden
-an inspiration
-radiated strength
-one tough cookie
Okay. So I flip back to the front page to make sure I wasn’t really reading the “Onion” or something. But no, this shit is for real. It’s not satire.
How come in these courageous disease stories never give any credit to the doctors, btw.? Has anyone ever noticed that? You never hear anything about how the doctors worked their asses off and applied their knowledge and skills to safe the poor sap. It’s always, “oh what a survivor this one is”. As if she’d done it all by herself. Give me a fucking break.
