Alexa, I said I felt sorry for your children, because even though they are getting love and nurturing, they are also being taught an exclusive, condescending view of humanity. You may be developing them intellectually, but little hearts and spirits don't thrive just on ideas and superbly developed thought processes. Tolerance, compassion and understanding are also important values to teach, and after rereading both your posts several times I still feel that your comments are mean-spirited. It seems to me that it would be hard for it not to eventually rub off on your children that they are better than other people, simply because they are cleaner, smarter, and have more money.
This is important to me because one-fifth of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day, and the gap between the rich and poor is widening. Increasingly, there are two Americas with no connection, no common understanding. Thirty to forty thousand children are still starving to death every day because of easily preventable diseases. It is easy to say that everyone can pull themselves up by hard work (and I guess you would add a lot of reading, Alexa), but that is simplistic. We have to somehow get to a more egalitarian place where more of our population has an actual shot at a good opportunity. Prenatal care, free drug treatment, quality preschool childcare for mothers who are forced to work, HeadStart programs for all children who would benefit from them, and public schools that provide the same quality of instruction in poor communities as wealthy ones, would be a start. Adults create their own reality, and need to work hard to solve their problems. But children are innocent, and deserve intervention.
These divisions are enormous, and getting worse. I don't want to live behind security gates, and yet that seems the direction we are heading. I sometimes feel here at SI that I am at the French court, just prior to the revolution. This is not just some stupid cat fight, at least from my point of view. When someone is callous, mean, cold and basically cruel to an entire group of people, judging them all to inferior, it gives me a chill.
It's laudable, Alexa, that you overcame a great deal to be where you are. I would have thought that would give you more understanding of people who are still struggling, not less. I certainly don't have all the answers, and did not mean to be condescending. I am just very frustrated. |
