Brain Fertilizer

(calls dad)

(y'all are still driving the farm trucks, right? No Beemers? He validates, "we don't buy German cars, what are ya, nuts?")

(looks at checkbook. $67 of last week's paycheck remains, $200 of "minumum payments" on doctor bills due today)

If the left is how you describe, maybe I need to defect to their specific enclave. 'cuz right now, I think I am feeling a decidedly less paletteable version of poverty.

Aside from snark:
Go live in the poorer sections of China, French Guyana, Myanmar, Mexico. Then we can talk poverty.
Remember what the Jews went through in WWII, go tour the mass graves and children's prisons of Iraq, listen to first-hand stories of Mao's China. Then we can talk tyranny.

It just ain't happening in the US. No amount of distortion to win votes can make it true.

I've never said I feel tyranny happens in the US. That said, I would like to think most liberals AND conservatives are globally aware enough to realize what tyranny is. As for poverty, I think there is true poverty in the US, though not widespread. You don't have to go very far south, IMO, to encounter it...Oaxaca comes to mind. Not sure why we have such chummy relations with Mexico when the government turns a blind eye to the destitution, poverty, and deplorable environment.

Yeah, Nathan, I'm not exactly sure where you're going with this, either. Conservatives may have the good sense to give the Indigo Girls a wide berth, but are they more likely to have first-hand experience with life among the poor in French Guyana? I think you could make the point that leftists are more likely than others to affect *solidarity* with the poor and downtrodden, and that that tendency is especially galling in people with trust funds. In my experience, though, leftists are not any more likely to come from rich families.

Do I have to be going anywhere with it?

It seemed Jo was saying she is a liberal and never experienced that sort of wealth. She seemed to be splitting hairs on specifics. So aside from my snark and hers, I'm proposing a new direction for America: using our wealth and freedom and clout to help bring about economic and political freedom across the globe. Just handing out money never works, but we'll have to spend large sums to help create circumstances that allow people to enjoy freedom and create wealth, just like we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It may be a few years before we can help the next region, but I think we should be considering it now.
But the first argument against that is that we should take care of Americans first. My belief is that Americans already have all we need, and the government entitlements championed by the left are unnecessary and counterproductive. The relative "poverty" in the US still represents more wealth than 100s of millions will ever experience. And no one in the US is far from wealth, with reasonable choice and reasonable effort. That's not true of many places, where there is virtually no chance to improve your lot in life.

But Rule #1 is: you don't have to agree. You don't even have to think I have an interesting point.

I'm the last person opposed to spreading the wealth amongst needy nations, but I am most definitely (and to the chagrin of friends in BOTH parties sometimes) an "America First-er".

One area I see a lot of poverty is within the subset of folks afflicted with untreated mental illness, who do not receive any help from their families. Some studies show that the number of homeless afflicted with mental illness is as high as 30%. Some of these people do not even know about housing/foodstamp options. What they really need is to be treated for their conditions so they might return to normal society.

I hear a lot about building Afghani and Iraqi schools, but as I have lamented to you in the past, Nathan, I volunteer at a school that is actually rejecting new students, the classrooms are so cramped. The nearest school next to it is many miles away and out of reach for most parents. SOME children should not be afforded an opportunity for education, ALL should. Especially if we're gonna get in the business of building schools in other countries.

Also, I invite you down any time to see how the migrant workers live here. What is our responsibility to them? frankly, I don't even know the answer. But 14 year olds and younger are out tending fields in May, well before school lets out. And legally, they can. What about school for these kids? What are the rights of the parent? Does the welfare of the child supercede the desires of the parent? If so, we've got problems on the homefront to deal with first.

"Do I have to be going anywhere with it?"

Well, not really. Since this is your property, you can talk about why vanilla ice cream tastes better with the little seeds in it if you like; but the beginning of your post said, "The mindset of the left is easier to understand if...." Maybe I'm overinterpreting, but that sounds to me like the intro to something you think important, and I just didn't get what you were driving at. (I certainly don't want to nettle you further, but given that you mentioned BMW and espresso instead of just the family car and coffee, it doesn't seem like a leap for Jo to take what you were saying as a caricature of all liberals as spoiled--I took it that way, too.)

Jo,
The left should have been the ones pushing for the liberation of Iraq. That many cite Halliburton (an American company that employs Americans with high-paying jobs overseas, i.e., INsourcing) as a reason to leave a dictator in place, and then with the same breath criticize the Bush administration for not stopping OUTsourcing is just one example of Liberal hypocrisy. There are many others.

Sean,
Ah, yes. I am going somewhere with this. Sort of. A) I'm on the attack against the morally bankrupt hypocrisy of the Left. It's an ongoing thing. B) I am building up to some suggestions on changing the course of the nation, away from the "Winner Takes All" mentality of conservatives/Republicans, but also away from the power-hungry pandering and influence peddling entitlements of the liberals/Democrats. But rather than write a 300-page thesis like Bill Whittle, I'm going to share my vision one post at a time, only a few hundred words each post. Snark will be a part of it, and along the line, I will probably alienate and anger Liberals, libertarians, and Conservatives.

The left isn't a big fan of vanity wars, Nathan.

;)

Actually, snark aside: the left wing I identify with doesn't think military action is the solution to the world's ills. "Liberate" is a wonderful sounding word, but it still causes WAR.

Anyway, before we got off onto that tangent...I would like you to answer the question I have posed previously.

I would like your honest answer on what our obligation to illegal immigrants is.

When there is no agricultural work in the winter, I have seen these people camped out in tents, rummaging through garbage for food (given, this is the worst case of it I have seen and doesn't happen with all of them).

Now, if we are going to talk "global poverty", what is our obligation to people who live here illegally?

The left isn't a big fan of vanity wars

Mm-hmm. Can you construct a sentence using the terms "President Clinton", "Bosnia", and "legacy"? I knew you could.

I didn't aware the illegal immigrant issue was a question for me.

Our responsibility is clear: enforce the law. Quit encouraging illegal immigration with a wink and a smile. Michelle Malkin has a sizable body of work on the issue, and I pretty much agree with her 99%, and can't remember what the remaining 1% of disagreement might be, just that I haven't read every single word she may have written on the subject...
We have an immigration policy. It's there for a reason. Most people have to play by the rules, so we shouldn't let some people slide in for free. Especially since being in an illegal status keeps them from being able to truly improve and/or enrich themselves, rather, it keeps them more or less enslaved. And I don't care if the price of tomatoes or whatever doubles, either.

But my question is this: you say there's no true poverty in the US. I disagree, citing illegal immigrants. But do we as a country have an obligation to them, or the same obligation had they still lived across the border?

I ask not to be argumentative at all...I think this is an area we need to start discussing first when we talk about poverty.

You are getting distracted with shadows.

There will always be a problem you can say "if we just throw more money at it, it will be better." Uh-uh. Johnson's Great Society demonstrated the fallacy of that.

I may not have made it clear what I mean by "true" poverty.
The school programs and scholarships and libraries and GED programs and Community Colleges we have all across this great nation make it possible for any impoverished family to raise themselves up by their bootstraps within 1 generation. That most families don't doesn't mean the opportunity isn't there, but that they are being paid to not even try. Our welfare system offers little to no incentive to return to work. Welfare reform helped quite a bit, but states like New York are already working around the restrictions. In fact, we are paying people to not get married and have more out-of-wedlock births. Again, welfare reform has helped, but it will probably another 15 years before we start seeing the benefits of that reform.
Illegal immigrans are quite possibly the exception to that rule. Being illegal, they cannot take a low-paying job to build a resume and work up to a good job, like anyone else can. They are stuck on the fringes. Being stuck on the fringes, their children, even though citizens, are denied some of the advantages of the children of citizens and legal resident aliens. It can be overcome, but is much harder.
To that extent I agree.
However, the solution remains the same: stop making it easy for them to remain as illegals, which we do for the sake of cheap labor. I don't care if it's Republicans or Democrats who are using that excuse, I think it is wrong. It would make things more difficult for one generation, yes, but as I've said before (many times), I take the long view, and try to avoid the quick easy fixes. I want policies that provide natural incentives to obey the law and do the right thing, not ones that reward those who break the law.
From what I have read, this is exactly what Michelle Malkin says...I learned some of it from her, some of it I merely found that we were in agreement before I read her stuff.

I can't take Malkin' opinions on immigration seriously, due to the fact she gets her panties in a wad to the point that she writes a column over the poor kid at McDonalds who had trouble understanding her order and obviously was a case of ESL.

Lord, I can't believe she gets paid to do that.

At any rate: here's some poverty right here in our country, what to do, what to do. They're already here, they're not gonna go back, their children are citizens. it's a quagmire of its own.

I absolutely disagree. I think you are missing the point, and the Democrat party has demonstrated its inability to deal rationally with the problem in the first place. Your party will wring its hands forever over the problem, when action needs to be taken now to prevent this from occurring in the future. Then we can deal with the ones who are already here: you stop the flood before you start mopping up the floor. The Democrat solution is to extend voting rights to non-citizens in a not-so-subtle attempt to increase their power in a nation that is increasingly skeptical of Democrat "solutions" (i.e. raise taxes to give more entitlements).
In this, I don't agree with President Bush who co-opted the originally Democrat idea of amnesty, because it only encourages more illegals to sneak in for the hopes of another amnesty. That betrays all the people who did follow the rules to get here.

Heck, I think we need to find more incentives to encourage legal resident aliens to pursue their citizenship, because I'm a little tired of people who get all the benefits of living here without committing to this nation by giving up their previous citizenship. With half the citizens not voting, voting rights doesn't seem to be incentive enough...

Well, let's not get into "your party" here, because you know my feelings on immigration, and not only do I dislike the D's answer, but I dislike Bush's answer as well.

And I agree with urging people to strive for citizenship, of course. This may be one of few issues we come close to agreeing on.

Well, if you don't like what either party is proposing in regards to immigration, we are in agreement on that, too.

There has to be a better way, re: immigration. This is the greatest country in the world, being a citizen here is very special. It should be a goal for illegal immigrants, to say the least.

Unfortunately, people who follow the proper channels to move here from other countries face much red tape and adversity, yet there are so many back-door residents who sneak across the border...

I could go on and on.