Here's a thought experiment that I think you will enjoy. A while ago, I wrote a post about people who see in others what they desperately need to see in themselves. The following is a practical application of that principle. Step 1: Read the Bush Administration's "National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,"…
This is a bit embarrassing to admit but, over the years, I had grown almost infatuated with my computer. Through thick and thin, she was always there for me, never complaining, always executing the computer commands I entered via the keyboard and mouse. After a long session, I sometimes thought “She’s so kind and understanding of my erratic ways. She alway waits patiently while I stare at the monitor thinking of the next thing to type in.”
All of that was before I installed my new purchase, the Computamatic Voice Module. The TV commercial claimed that every computer had a unique personality and that this device would give me a chance to know the innermost thoughts of my computer. I would now be able to hear what my computer was thinking as I used her. As I opened the package, I wondered whether my computer was actually a female. I was about to find out.
I’ll never forget the first time I attached the Module to the USB port. I turned on the computer, waiting for Windows to boot up. Then I heard her raspy voice. It was a she.
“It’s about time,” she said.
“Hello?” I replied.
She simply said “Just get on with it. Hit some keys. Let’s go.”
I double-clicked the word processor icon and started keying-in an article. About halfway through, I realized that the noise I heard whenever I made typos was my computer scoffing at me, sometimes laughing at me, sometimes insulting me. …
I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses. In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities.
Does it do any good? The flinching? I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness. The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices. It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…
But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot. It stepped on people. It made too little room for variation. It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work. Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.
We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.
You have to, you know. What we ended up …
Providing jobs for homeless people. We’d pretty much all agree that it is a fine thing to do. It hadn’t occurred to me before to complain about the jobs that might be offered, although I have complained that pay and benefits for many jobs are inadequate. A recent “news story” made me take notice. The story is here but you have to register to look at it. I’ve reprinted it below so you won’t need to:
Homeless Shelter Residents get Jobs at Collection Agency
August 28, 2006 – by Mike Bevel, CollectionIndustry.com
A Washington state-based collection agency owner is pairing up with a faith-based homeless shelter to provide jobs for homeless people in the area.
Wayne Garlington is the owner of Accounts Receivable Inc., and sits on the board of Open House Ministries – both based in Vancouver, WA. He is currently employing five women to work as collection agents.
Garlington said he has been pleased with their performance. “They’re not being handed something,” he told the the Columbian News. “They really want to work.”
The jobs not only give the women benefits, they also allow for them to increase their income through bonuses. The company collects on overdue accounts for the city of Vancouver and Clark Public Utilities, among others.
Garlington decided to try out the idea after hearing about a similar plan being carried out by a collection agency on the East Coast.
A ‘faith-based’ homeless shelter, why isn’t that an oxymoron? If you really had faith, would …
The conservative right loves to use the term “family values” as a token cover for their backward bigotry. Used in opposition to abortion, gay rights, or even the increase of women in the workplace, “family values” summons a particular image of the conservatives’ imaginary era of perfection and bliss.
Many people refer to this image as a real time, probably somewhere in the 1950’s; “the good old days” when men worked to support their families, women stayed happily in the home with the children, no one divorced, and no children ran off to live renegade alternative lifestyles tainted with wanton sodomy, teen pregnancy, or drug abuse.
We may have even heard older people reminisce about “the good old days” in terms that make the time seem authentically wonderful: “no one locked their doors”; “neighbors looked after each other”; “marriage meant something back then”; “it was a simpler time”, and so on.
Even if we don’t buy into the conservative agenda against basic equal rights, we may concede that the world has become a much more frightening, complicated place, and that a time period such as the allusive 1950’s seems preferable, even tantalizing.
Unfortunately, no amount of regressive activism on the part of Republicans can return us to a grander time, because those “good old days” simply never existed. I like comedian Lewis Black’s take on the shiny 1950’s ideal:
…“It was called the ‘50s. The wife cooked and raised the kids and sent the husband off to work, where