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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (42091)	1/8/2002 11:50:52 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

Thanks. I, too, am disappointed by those who treat history as a purely academic exercise, without any real recognition that there were real people living real lives, eating or starving, living or dying, killing or being killed. We in this country have lived the last fifty years remarkably free from the kind and degree of strife which most of the human race has experienced for most of history, and much of the human race still experiences, where basic survival is the primary focus of life. I don't know how long this bubble will last, but I do know it won't last forever. (If you credit the thesis of "The Death of the West" it will come sooner rather than later!) It's like the young investors who flocked into the market in the last decade, for whom the term "bear market" was just a phrase, who simply didn't believe that stock prices went down as well as up. We in this country in this day and age are so isolated from the basic tenets of history that it becomes too easy to think that a life of ease and comfort is the norm, not the very rare exception. My epihany in all this came when I read that the the federal government was defining the poverty level in terms of the cost of dinner at McDonalds. As thought that was the minimum standard below which life could not be allowed to fall. The poverty income level for America included plenty of food, electric service, telephone service, a home to themselves (house or apartment, but not shared quarters), a car, and other amenities which in most of the world would constitute a life of extraordinary luxury. That is poverty?? Orwellian.