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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George S. Montgomery who wrote (76780)	4/3/2000 7:38:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

>The need for More More More (for "us") and Screw Them (for the "not us") revolts me. Organically, I truly feel we are all parts of the same body. And, cosmically, a tiny body it is. And, temporarilly, a flash-in-the-pan body it is.< This is somehow astonishing to me. It shouldn't be, but it is. Maybe I am karmically a Landlord. I understand the argument, and it resonates with me. After all, if I were a landlord in a Rent Stabilized environment (or a wage-earner in a socialist state) I would passionately desire, and despair of finding, SOME mechanism to selectively put my hard-earned money or productivity or (...) into the hands of the unfortunate-but-salvageable, and NOT into the hands of the merely indolent. Screw'em. I think that in a society that lavishly supports its downtrodden, there is a powerful force, a drag at work: many people, being given the opportunity to eke out a minimum existence with absolutely no requirement to pay for it, would go the Lazy Way. It's genetic; it's evolved into us. I feel the siren song in my blood to just hang it up and be poor someplaceelse and get my gubmint check and eat out of a can with a grinning doggie on it. And that scares me, because that is death on a loan plan. For me, the hope and glory of mankind is to DO stuff, to BUILD a future, and that belongs to the bright, motivated, organized children. Class president. Science fair finalist. Debate team champ. I want then to get the goodies, and the ones who can't or won't ... should be given every chance to do and try, but failure should be duly rewarded with "no doughnut". I fear greatly that a society based on compassion will bleed itself of any destiny greater than decadence. And it's my assessment of the human animal that is at work here ... remove the goad that the consequences of failure represent, and the rewards of success will be too much diluted to be the engine of social survival, let alone health. Unless we can conjure an escape hatch by rewriting our meat. And that is where my romantic idea, my escapism comes into play perhaps.