As I have said many times we each see a different reality. It is actually very depressing to me because I have come to conclude that we cannot bridge the gap.
Your reality is set and so is mine. There is no way I can change your mind or you mine. My story:
I was pretty much totally uneducated until I was 20 and worked in a paper bag factory for years after I graduated from high school.
I somehow stumbled into college just as they were ready to advance me to an operator. I had this epiphany I needed to educate myself. Only kid in my family to go to college. My brother only got throught the 8th grade and is a very good plumber. I was very conservative in those days and hated the kids at Berkeley.
When I first got to a junior college (I had no grades to go anywhere else) I had a hard time holding a thought for even a few minutes. It would take me a week to write a very poor 500 word paper (something I can now do in 5 minutes in final form.
I couldn't spell very well and sentence structure was a complete mystery to me-lol. I started out majoring in business because I was poor and that seemed logical to me.
Then slowly as I was forced to read books I would never have read on my own, like the Republic of Plato, I started to be exposed to ideas I had never thought of. I was very insecure about my intellectual abilities to pass courses like statistics. I ended up with about 30 units in statistics related subjects before I finished my studies.
Well, after two years in the junior college I transferred to a state college (still a C student), still majoring in business.
Then one day as I was walking past some dorms I had a second epiphany and realized I still was misssing the big picture i.e. I had no idea really why Plato's writngs were so important, or Sartre and Camus, or Watts.
So for my junior and senior year I lay on my couch and read all the great minds in the world I thought might teach me what these big ideas were all about e.g. Zen or existentialism, etc.
At first I had no idea what they were talking about, but
slowly my thinking started to change as new ideas were brought to my attention. I changed my major to philosphy and psychology, so I could concentrate on learning about my species and the universe of ideas
As my grades kept getting better, I then went on to do graduate work at the University of Washington. By the time I finished graduate school my thinking had changed 180 degrees.
I now had the ideas of Baudelair, Tolstoy, Plato, Huxley, Malreaux, Voltair and especially Heese and Camus and many many others and I was reborn as a liberal existentialist. Long journey from the bag factory.
Story of my life, but I do remember what my thinking was when I was a conservative. I lived in a much different reality then. - true story!
Let me try a little logic on you and see what you think.
We are a secualr democracy. So if we start teaching creationism alongside evolution in the schools which religious version do we teach?
These are the things liberals ask themselves,
Cheers |
