Rich college student "liberal" dabblers must die.

The BBQ Pit
41

Actually John, I think that it is bravery of a sort to be vegetarian:[ul]
[li] You get scorn from the majority of the population[/li][li] You get hassle most days of your life from the majority of the population[/li][li] It makes going out to eat much trickier[/li][li] It makes food preparation much trickier[/li][li] If, as the kabbess does, you actually love meat, it is a daily battle against temptation[/li][li] And you’re doing all this simply because of an ethical position[/ul]That qualifies as bravery in my book, whether or not you happen to share the ethical belief that leads to it.[/li]
pan

::sits back and waits for the inevitable Über-hijack on vegetarianism to kick off… Please prove me wrong guys, we’ve already done that to death::

42

Or maybe they’ll just flake out and end up picking strawberries for a living because they wasted all their money on field trips to the local Vegan Foods Co-op and Revolutionary Training Center.

43

kabbes said:

Of course, the people even sven was talking about were going to a vegetarian commune in Colorado, most likely in Boulder. Vegetarianism there isn’t quite the brave journey you describe in your post.

44

I used to work for a nonprofit that was associated with a farmworkers’ union drive in North Carolina. One of our organizers took a group of activists on a weeklong trip to talk with migrant laborers, to coordinate strategies between different organizations and to gather information to disseminate to other groups.

When he came back, he was spitting mad about two college girls who’d gone on the trip. They were arrogant; they tried to control the whole trip (which he’d spent more than a month planning), they flirted with the workers and made the group constantly late from place to place. He swore he’d never work with college students again.

On the other hand, I’ve known college students who worked with farmworkers’ unions and who were great. College kids can do a lot of good in these circumstances, I think.

Organizing drives are primarily informatin-based. You need to gather stories about mistreatment from workers; you need to let workers know what their rights are under the law; you need to distribute union literature and explain what a union can do; and you need to go back to your own community and encourage people to support the drive, either through boycotts, through highly-visible protests, through letters to companies, or through financial support.

If you go on an organizing drive and you spend your time picking strawberries, you’re dramatically missing the point. You don’t help people in bad conditions by mimicking their conditions; you help them by finding out what they need doing and doing it.

Daniel

45

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by kabbes *
Actually John, I think that it is bravery of a sort to be vegetarian:[ul]
[li] You get scorn from the majority of the population[/li][li] You get hassle most days of your life from the majority of the population[/li][/QUOTE]

I find that a bit overstated. I know plenty of vegetarians, and I’ve never seen them scorned either to their faces or behind their backs. At least, not scorned so long as they didn’t scorn the meat-eaters first. Of course, I’m not a vegan, so I can’t really speak on the amount of scorn and hassle heaped upon you.

[QUOTE]
[li] It makes going out to eat much trickier[/li][li] It makes food preparation much trickier[/li][/QUOTE]

And “trickier” means “brave”? I’m sorry, that’s just wrong.

Having to wade through protestors and people who hate you so that you can exercise your rights as a human being: brave.

Having to drive an extra fifteen minutes because Applebee’s doesn’t offer as good a salad menu as T.G.I.Friday’s: inconvenient.

[QUOTE]
[li] If, as the kabbess does, you actually love meat, it is a daily battle against temptation[/li][li] And you’re doing all this simply because of an ethical position[/ul]That qualifies as bravery in my book, whether or not you happen to share the ethical belief that leads to it.[/li][/QUOTE]

By that logic, I’m a brave man for having quit smoking. After all, it’s a daily battle against temptation (I did enjoy smoking). I don’t buy that. We can talk about willpower and strength of convictions- but that doesn’t mean bravery to me. No one’s going to beat you or your wife up for being vegan. At worst, you have to be a bit pickier about where you shop or go out for dinner, and occasionally you have to suffer from rude idiots. That’s not bravery.

46

So something is only a brave action if it involves wading through fifteen minutes worth of protesters or having your wife beaten up?

For the record, I am not vegetarian. I still think that making a choice that makes your life more difficult just because you think it is ethically correct is a brave act however. Doing it in the face of hostility (and you do face hostility, of a kind that you wouldn’t realise at all until you’ve had to walk in their shoes) makes it a little braver. It isn’t of the level of selling up and moving to sub-Saharan Africa to build water pumps, but it still takes courage of character.

Your giving up cigarettes was

(a) a sacrifice to benefit you not an ethical decision taken because you thought it was right; and
(b) something that you would have presumably been supported in, not sneered at for.

Nevertheless it was a brave thing to do, from a certain point of view. Only a little brave, possibly. Certainly not even in the same league as choosing not to eat something you like and that society says you should just because you think it is wrong. But accepting any challenge takes some level of bravery. Even a selfish challenge.

Nevertheless I do take Necros’ point about the commune.

pan

47

Hey, I had a salad for lunch, so where’s my Medal of Honor? C’mon, it had cucumbers and everything–damn, I’m brave.

48

the way I see it, those girls don’t win for trying.

in scenario a:

rich girl purses liberal degree.
-well, what a phony bitch she is.

rich girl pursues biz. degree
-well, so fucking typical of a rich person to not give a shit. to only give a shit about money.
in scenario B:

rich girl decides to get a liberal degree…

she decides to not pursue school sponsored trips, etc.
-well, what a little sheltered rich girl. what use is her degree if she doesn’t know what it’s like in the real world.
she decides to take trips, etc:
-well who does she think she is? Little miss moneybags wondering around a strawberry field. how ‘impressive’. I wonder if she has a gucci bag to put all those strawberries in.
in Scenario C:

she decides to pursue vegetarianism
-well what does she know about vegetarianism? (insert all rant ‘meat eaters’ sling to ‘veggies’)

she decides not to pursue vegetarianism
-well, (insert all rants ‘veggies’ sling at ‘meat eaters’)

I just don’t see how the girl could win when you already have an additude towards them to begin with.

Is the girl niave? perhaps, yes. but weren’t we all? and arent we all STILL, in situations that are new and foreign to us?
further more,
the OP claims that one spent a long time reading books, etc. and the implication of what a waste it is.

Well, perhaps in all her reading she learned useful things such as not all ‘brown skinned’ latinos are Mexican. Pretty ignorant of the op to call all laborers Mexicans, for being such a Liberal. Many pickers come from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador. This is just another example of how the OP puts down someone for the same stuff another would find her guilty of. The OP may think all Latinos can be bundled under the heading of "mexican’ but to us Latinos, we are NOT all the same. Its like calling English people Americans, cause you know, we all look the same and talk the same. Maybe the OP should borrow some of those books herself.

and rich girls are belittled because they went on a trip to a 3rd world country instead of applying the money to a cause here.

Even Sven, I have to ask you, what are YOU doing for the cause? What specifically makes YOU a more worthy of the liberal moniker?

Shall we start going through your life choices, expenses, etc and put them on a chart to see where you fall? Hmmmm, those shoes you’re wearing. Why arent you wearing rope sandals? or better yet, barefoot?
Jesh, you could have donated the remainding money to a worthy cause, no?

In the end, I feel that the smallest deed accomplishes more than the grandest intentions. And these girls, though they may not be going about it the best way, are at least trying.

Even Sven, sweetie, there’s something on your shoulder. It’s called a chip. You may want to do something about it.

49

Oh come on, I am a vegetarian and it is the biggest not a big deal on earth. It is super not a big deal when you live in a nice happy veggie commune where you don’t even face the minscule challenges that vegetarians face in regular life.

My problem isn’t that they have money- some of my very best friends are affluent and liberal and they are still pretty cool. But it does seem like having money is a prerequisite for this kind of arrogance. It costs money to buy airplane tickets to those protests about how other people should get more money. It costs money to waste your time in college not learning.

Did you know that you can volunteer as much as you want, but if you want credit for it you pay full tuition? I’ve got a problem with that. If you volunteer because you are a good person, you do okay. But if you volunteer and pay thousands of dollars, you get a degree.

I am all about volunteering (something I don’t do a lot myself) but it is not a good thing when you are condescending towards the people you are trying to help. Once I was in a typical ‘liberal indoctornation class’. I didn’t talk about my background until the last day. That turned out to be a really good idea. After I talked about where I grew up and that sort of thing, people started treating me really differently. I became the subject of their liberal guilt. They would talk to me in hushed tones about how much they admire my courage and that sort of thing. I changed instantly in their eyes from “Jennifer”’ to “poor kid”. I felt like an animal in the zoo. Hey, let’s go look at the real live poor kid! Maybe we can get it to talk about how opressed it was in the ghetto! It was really demeaning and made me uncomfortable and feel like a freak. I can only imagine how much worse it is to be visibly different.

I do think it is a good thing that people from our school are helping to organize strawberry workers. I just wish that more people would realize that these are real live people with real lifes that are important- not an insignifigant pet project that you can walk in to instantly expect them to be grateful. I wish they’d learn that things arn’t going to be cut and dried. The answers arn’t so easy that you can send over a bunch of college girls to make the problems go away. And I wish they’d recognize that they while they get to return to their warm beds at night, these people are stuck in their lives. I’m not saying that the girls have to be poor or anything like that, they just need to acknowledge and understand their privledge and think about what it means.

A classmate of mine went out to make a documentary about the fields that she worked in when she was a child. She was harrased and whistled at by the workers. She was nearly beat up by the owner of the field. It wasn’t as simple as “I’m a college student and therefore I get to do whatever I want and everyone is going to be cool with that”. A lot of Mexican people are conflicted about how they feel about a lot of issues. The unions can get corrupt. The culture can get misogynist. It isn’t white man bad mexican man good. It is complex. You have to sit down and talk to these people on their own level for a while. Eat thanksgiving dinner at their house. Play Nintendo with their son. Maybe then you’ll be ready to understand the issues. But I have a feeling that as much as these girls talk about helping the Mexicans, they’d be hard pressed to talk to one in a non-condescending manner. That’d mean they’d have to them as people, not school projects, and frankly I am skepticle that they are capable of that. These are the same people after all, that read all kinds of multicultural this and that, but when confronted with the set of dorms that have a high amount of ethinic diversity, they get a little freaked out and then start talking about how “ghetto” they are. It never even occurs to them that that goes against all the ideology they claim to espouse.

There are college students that are doing good things. There are college students that are doing great things. This brand of student isn’t one of them.

Yes, there are sour grapes here. The people I grew up with didn’t get to go to college because they went to a school that didn’t have things like guidance couselers and AP classes and college fairs. My friends are now stubling through junior college, trying not to get bored to death or lured away in to the world of work. And yet our colleges are stuffed full with people that would rather die than take an actual class and walk around talking about how much they are helping the poor (hint: I don’t see anyone I grew up with better off- all I see is them not getting in to college so that these girls can use those spots to “help” people like the people I grew up with). I’m more than a little bitter. I know life isn’t fair, but knowing that doesn’t make it suck any less.

I don’t know what the answer is. It all comes down to the fact that we need more diversity in our neighborhoods so that people grow up looking at people that are different from them as friends, not freaks. Short of that, I’d like to see the Community Studies major reformed so that it isn’t essentially buying a degree. I’d like to see a more complex approuch to the issues, a more scholarly outlook (and maybe I am being a hardass traditionalist here- but in my experience people that are exposed to more complex theory tend to come up with less simplistic realities). Majors like this can be a really good thing. But treating everything problem as one of simplistic bianaries isn’t a good thing.

50

Most of the development students around here are actually quite broke. They raise money for their trips by working part-time or fundraising activites like dinner parties in church basements where they all get together to make food and provide entertainment.

51

in case you missed reading this in the post above yours:

52

Hey, I’m just going off of what I know, which is a bunch of graduates of Watsonville high school. They talk say things like "I got teased because I wasn’t Mexican enough’ and “I went to school with a lot of other Mexicans, but a lot of them didn’t like me because I wasn’t from a farmworker family” and "You have to go to Watsonville to get real Mexican food because there arn’t as many Mexicans in Santa Cruz as there are in Watsonville.

From what I have gathered, the farmworkers in Watsonville are largely Mexican. This is not true of all farmworkers or even of all farmworkers in Watsonville. It might be that my friends are leading me astray or are simply only concerned with Mexican people from Watsonville, but I don’t think that is what is happening.

53

I gotta confess that I find this lefty competition to see who is more noble and self-sacrificing to be hysterically funny. The preening of ego underneath the liberal do-gooder facade just shines through so brightly.

Povery isn’t noble; it sucks. just ask a poor person. Any of the campesinos picking strawberries would trade in for an SUV and a home theater system in a house in the 'burbs in a Tijuana second.

This trashing of “materialism”–puh-leeze, do you think that poor folks don’t want material things because poverty is ever so much more spiritual?

Anyway, hijack over. You guys can back to boasting about your humility now.

54

You could pick on any slug major and you chose the community studies folks?

I guess making fun of the “History of Consciousness” people would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Carry on . . .

55

Gobear, I read several people in this thread talking (directly or indirectly) about ways to help alleviate poverty. That’s not a humility contest. Glad you’re easily amused, though!

'Course, I went to a school where a person could get 16 credits for making an herbal first-aid kit, if they really felt like wasting daddy’s money. Rumor has it that one person once did a 2-credit independent study in underwater basket weaving, just to prove that it could be done.

So I can’t make fun of anyone else’s school.

Daniel

56

I’m all for alleviating poverty, but that’s not so much what’s being discussed as mythologizing it as being somehow more noble and pure than being wealthy. That’s what I find funny.

There is a difference between learning about the communtiy and asking them what they need and a priori assuming you know what they need. In this thread, I’m getting, like JayJay a strong sense of condescension and arrogance that liberal white girls who’ve read a few books can just swoop down on a community and tell them what’s what.

If they really want to do good, they need to listen twice as much as they talk, ask the community what their most pressing problems are, and let the migrant workers do the leading. Poor folks need self-sufficency, not saviors.

57

You have to sit down and talk to these people on their own level for a while. That’s irony Alanis.
We must be reading a different thread gobear.

58

“If you talk to them on their own level”–that’s condescending. Don’t talk “on their level”–just talk to them like people.

59

Yup, that’s what I though too. Should have quoted that, not bolded it.

60

I mostly agree. If you want to help folks, you gotta make sure they want your help.

However, there’s nothing wrong with making suggestions to folks (e.g., “A union might help, and here’s the laws about unions,” or “this remote Peruvian village could really use a latrine, so that the kids don’t all get sick from dysentary.”) Don’t romanticize ignorance either: if you got an education, you may as well share.

And if you’re a college student working with a program, choose a program that’s already engaged in a discussion with the (for example) farmworkers. Then do what the program tells you needs doing. If you decide to go in and start from square one, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

That’s what happened to my friend who worked with the local group, and that’s part of what pissed him off.

In my experience, leftist groups often suffer from arrogant newcomers who want to be involved in every decision, even ones that are already settled. This can really slow down a group that allows it.

Daniel