Actually, I didn't know what a Fuskie was. I was only in the law school, which doesn't really consider itself part of the UW. I don't really think of myself as a Husky, and since the Cougs don't have a law school there wasn't any rivalry there. The only Husky sports event I attended in three years there was when I volunteered one day to help take patients in the US stroke unit over to the game in their wheelchairs. We got free admission for accompanying them, pushing them over and back from the hospital and getting them snacks and just being there for them. Of course, the free admission to the game wasn't a bit of incentive for me! <bg> But UW lost big to USC, and they had a lot of other volunteers for this duty, so I didn't do it again.
There should be no "plateauing" of the commitment I perceive in many..
Certainly this seems to be the case with some, maybe many. But for others, I'm not sure that the commitment plateaus as much as priorities get adjusted within the commitment. But it's certainly true that I spend less time on social concerns now than I did 30 years ago. Family and children replace a lot of the time I used to commit to social causes. And let's be clear that one of the motivativations for social activity in my life and that of many of my friends was the socialization and desire to believe you were making a better world. Well, today those needs are met not in full but in large part by my family. I'm concerned with making a better world for and through them, first. What time and resources remain can be committed to making the world better for others, too. So I'm not sure plateauing is the issue; I see it more as redirection and reprioritizing.
But it's also true that as we age we tend to drift toward ideas that may appear externally to be more conservative. For example, when I had no money, and was fired with the belief that "stone walls do not a prison make" and the example of King's Letter from Birmingham City Jail firing the imagination that time spent in jail could be positive, elightening time, there wasn't much the government could do to me (except Bull Conner's police dogs -- they scared the sh@t out of me, frankly). Fine me, so what if I had no money. Jail me, you don't touch my spirit. So the government had little control over me. But today, I have a lot more to lose, so the threat that the government might fine or jail me is, I admit, a meaningful control factor. Maybe it's impossible to be a fully committed left winger unless you are single and broke.
And there's also the theory that it isn't the 1960s liberals who have changed, but liberalism that has changed out from under them. But that's not an appropriate topic for this thread, so I'll take it over to the Boxing Ring.
And BTW, these methods should become
nonconfrontational as civilized society should be able to solve problems through an intellectual, rather than a physical
way.
I agree in theory. But in practice, it doesn't seem to work that way. The main difference from 30 years ago, I think, is that the courts are much more accessible to promote social agendas. Environmentalists, especially, have been very successful in substituting court action for sitting in trees, blocking logging roads, etc. Thirty years ago that wouldn't have been possible. But overall, it's not because the people with the power (which group, I have to say, now includes most or all of us on SI, whether we like it or not, since power follows money and most of are here because we have money) are any more willing to listen to intellectual arguments, IMO. It's just that Mao has been superceded -- today, much political power comes out of the computer of a lawyer. |
