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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pezz who wrote (1896)	10/9/2000 10:59:51 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

Okay, pezz. I understand the reluctance of one to accept this argument. It rubs against most of our grains. We want to think that EVERYONE knows what's wrong or right. They used to have this question on an IQ test (objected to by people as being culturally biased). You find a letter with a stamp on it. What should you do with it? The multiple choice question had "the right" answer on it ("put it in a mailbox") but if you came from a neighborhood that was cluttered with litter and garbage, the answer you got was "throw it away" or "leave it where it is". If you are getting your @ss kicked 7 days a week and are offered the choice to a) keep getting your @ss kicked 7 days a week, or b) join the Boyz in da 'Hood who will protect you, which would you choose? But part of being one of the Boyz is to go kick someone else's @ss once (backed up by the Boyz, of course), just so they knew you had it in you. This kind of moral ambiguity, over a lifetime, from all your friends and other first hand sources, except maybe your mamma and your church, leads to a slippery kind of thinking. Eventually, you don't even know you are wrong, especially when the inculcation begins early and the obvious rewards are great. It is hard for someone who hasn't lived it to understand it. I've been heavily involved in a sub-culture, not gang, but another kind and I understand how this moral relativism works. There are lots of reasons for how people do this calculation and most of it has nothing to do with how you and I view it. They don't know you and me, so what we think simply doesn't matter. I see the same thinking when people start justifying wars like Panama, or Kuwait. All I was saying is that, like it or not, this is how things are. What people believe other people have affects how wrong it is to do something. There was a study a while back (maybe 10 years ago) conducted on inner city kids asking them what the "typical" white person owned and did. Surprisingly, or not, the was a perception by black youth that whites had more than 10 times what the whites actually had. TV and movies are largely responsible for the perception problem. You don't see ordinary people in the movies or on TV and that this perception problem gets rolled into the equation. So, if you're a little hungry, or wearing kind of crumby clothes, does it seem so wrong to boost the rims of a Beamer over in the Crenshaw from someone who has so much more? Then once you've done this 50 times before you could even drive, maybe your sense of right and wrong is dulled by our standards. I'm not excusing it. I'm explaining it. If you can't explain it, you can't fix it. I want to fix it.