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Old Apr 7, 2006, 04:42 pm   #12 (permalink) (top)
Athena
Volcanic Erupter
 
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Location: Oregon
Posts: 5,238
Quote:
Quote by: char
I believe that we should ask ourselves, "what are mypriorities?" The greatest priorities should recieve the greatest attention. For instance, computers and technology are a convenience, whereas health care is a necessary. Which one should pay better? The one that is required or the one that makes things easier? I say the one that is required. People usually don't devote themselves to frivolities.
My priority is the children. We, as a society, are not being honest about the conditions of childhood. At one time, the rich and poor really didn't have such different lives. No one had in door plumbing or electricity, or private cars that travel faster than horses and can go much further. Just the restriction of how far a person could walk, kept people to their neighborhoods where people knew each other and if they had time for fun, they got together to have fun. Few people had much money, and they didn't even think of material things that much, but their relationships. Reality has completely changed, and our consciousness has not kept pace.

Today the child in a good nieghborhood, with all the benefits middle class people can give their children, are so much better off then the children in low income, high crime housing, with nothing to do but get into trouble. I came from a single mother home, when women did women's work for low wages, and I was 18 when I met my father who kept his second family in a protected nieghborhood, where his children were protected from the neighborhoods where I grew up. I know there is a huge difference between these economic groups. They have very different realities and niether group really understands the reality of the other. On another thread we are debating if parents should be blamed if a child commits a crime. What a terrible thing to debate when separate from social reality. As though everyone had middle class families. Or the other extreme, as old as the beginning of the US, when some founders had no intentions of giving the poor the vote! We either expect too much, or not enough of our poor, and think too little of economic and social justice.
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