Used2BMarkoh wrote:
arcadesonfire wrote:
It seems to me to be a conflict of interest to have both "Love thy neighbor" and "they aren't gonna change so let em starve" in his head.
Ok - I'd call that something more like hypocrisy, but I get what you're saying. But sometimes starving is what it takes to wake up, you know? Not starving literally, but it's certainly valid to think education dollars shouldn't be wasted on people who don't want to learn.
As I've said before, ya gotta be careful - you can fall in love with the feeling of being caring, instead of really being caring, which sometimes involves toughness. I can remember when conservatives sounded pretty harsh to me too. And sometimes we are, it's not like we're perfect people or anything. But I firmly maintain from my current perspective that conservatism is in fact the truly compassionate political philosophy. It's the philosophy that wants what is best for mankind, not merely that which doesn't hurt.
Well, I absolutely agree that money shouldn't be spent on high school education for people who really don't want or need high school education. The way my pop describes it, US schooling changed during the Eisenhower era into what we have now, where kids are passed on up through the grades whether or not they've mastered the material. Kids were all encouraged to get college education.
I once thought that this was right. But it no longer seems that way to me. Lots of people don't have the talents nor the desire to spend so much of their lives learning stuff that they won't use again. Seeing as how college education has left so many people in debt forever; seeing as how loss of manufacturing careers has hurt America; and seeing as how lots of people could probably live happy lives working in manufacturing and raising families without ever having had associates or bachelors degrees, it's time America recognizes again how different people are.
So yeah, i agree money shouldn't be spent on education for people who don't have the natural talent for it or who don't want it.
But on the other hand, there are lots of kids born with a genetic propensity for intelligence but who can't see it come to fruition because of the situation they live in. You can accuse me of class warfare, but the amount of opportunity provided to an urban kid with parents who work long hours in minimum wage jobs is really sad when compared to youngsters who succeeded in school mainly because of the funding and support they earned from their parents...
So poverty is largely cyclical. We can say "as long as we keep on just giving them money instead of forcing them to work, the new generations will continue to be lazy and continue to raise lazy kids." But if we continue with that and say "let them starve" to those who don't have the abilities or time to get jobs that will provide enough money for their kids to eat three healthy meals a day, then have we done the Christian thing? Or can we recognize that people who come from generations of poor parenting, poor work ethic, and forced but innefective education could be unlikely to raise kids on a minumum wage and also provide the kinds of non-monetary support to their kids that will make the kids harder workers?
Let them starve? Let them die to teach their friends a lesson? I didn't have enough money when I went to the hospital with those strokes last year. Should I have been left to starve? The hospital paid for it, and now I pay $550/mo for insurance.
I'm not really going anywhere with this post... So i'll try to make a final point: Poverty will always exist. We've done a lot to try to help it in America. Some methods--such as the education methods--are beginning to crack and even liberals are changing their minds (for example, all the super liberals who've done Teach for America and gone to teach in urban poverty stricken areas are seeing firsthand that the method doesn't work). However, the means that parents have to support their kids can still play a big role in what the next generation can do. So if we have the opportunity to help the next generation, perhaps by providing medicaid to their parents so that there is more money to help provide for the kids' extracurricular activities, then should we say "just let the parents get sick and die so that the kids see how important it is to have money to pay for insurance" or should we say "med care is so expensive that medicaid can be useful"?
To me it seems that there is a conflict between the ideal of being charitable and the ideal that self-reliance is best for everybody. It seems to me that ideals fall apart and that pragmatic approaches will be much more effective; but in my experience with religion, Christianity is all about idealism. (For example, murding your brother being the same as hating him is the same level of sin. That seems like pure idealism to me.) I once had the ideal that a woman who is pregnant but who can't afford to raise a kid and can't afford the costs of birth should still give birth to that baby. This was my Christian idealism. But it doesn't really work--similar to how the idealism that "from those according to their abilities to those according to their needs" doesn't work when sending tons of funding to Afghanistan.
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