Curmudgeon's Corner
Rants and Diatribes
Introduction
What's it all about?
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My sons would surely agree that I have a special talent for extracting
the negative aspects of anything and everything, then beating it to
death by belaboring the obvious. On this page, I can share that talent
with the world, thereby embarassing everyone in my family.
Brungart's First Unified Law of Gravity and Economics
My Theory of Everything
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Water flows downhill; money flows uphill.
On Yinglish
That's Youthful English, as opposed to Useful English
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Like, how can you, like, take anyone, like, seriously, when they
season, like, every sentence, like, with a liberal sprinkling of
“likes”? You know what I’m sayin’?
On Liberalism
How did we Liberals go astray?
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When I was attending college, I considered myself a Liberal, because
that implied that I believed in equal opportunity and equal rights for
all. I had to struggle against my own family, my religious upbringing,
and many of my friends to throw off the racial bigotry of my childhood
and become “liberal”. I think Liberals strayed from their
purpose when they began congratulating themselves for their
achievements in civil rights and began to believe that they knew what
was best for everyone, and that they could give it to them, whether
they wanted it or not. Their patronizing handouts reversed many of the
gains in self esteem that they had previously won for minorities,
leaving a bad taste in the voters' minds when they hear the word
“Liberal”. Now I consider myself neither Liberal nor
Conservative, just disillusioned.
On Bigotry
It will never go away
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Am I prejudiced? Yes.
Am I proud of it? No.
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As much as I struggle consciously to avoid it,
there are traces buried deep in my subconscious that control my opinions
and color my thoughts. My family was a good family. They would never
cheat or steal. They attended church regularly. They believed that
alcohol and tobacco were evil. All “dirty” words were banned
from the house - even darn was frowned upon. But they never doubted that
“colored people” did not deserve equal rights, and they
wouldn't even consider associating with them. I once heard my
grandfather, a church leader and sunday school teacher, explain to an
uncle why the bible proved that black people were forever doomed by God
to be servants and slaves because of the curse of Ham. The children in
my segregated school were even more bigoted, without the mitigating
factor of being “good” - they didn't bother to avoid gutter
language to soften the hatred. Older church members seemed universally
to agree with my parents. This was not in the deep south, but in
Maryland. I was no different, of course. I can't remember when I first
began to believe this bigotry was wrong, but certainly not before I had
left home to attend distant schools. I met a black person for the first
time only when I attended college.
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Eventually, this ingrained prejudice would drive a wedge between me and
my family - and cause me to abandon the family religion, which I came
to view as filled with hypocrisy. My reading and my thoughts convinced
me that no reasons existed for denying equal civil rights to anyone. I
have tried to avoid acting without bigotry and prejudice in my adult
life, and I have tried to raise my children to believe in equal rights
for all. Yet, I am still aware of deep-seated gut reactions in myself
that fight against my conscious principles. Reason is not enough to
stamp out rooted emotions and instincts.
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I believe that this hatred of “others” is one of the oldest
instincts of humanity. It was probably an advantageous evolutionary
trait in the building of early communities and tribes, binding them to
their local groups and allowing them to fight to the death any groups
that competed with them for food, water, and territory. It is certainly
not limited to whites hating blacks; blacks hate whites, hispanics hate
indians; Bosnians hate Serbs; Nazis hate Jews; Jews hate arabs;
Catholics hate Muslims... Moreover, these hatreds survive for
hundreds, even thousands of years. In Bosnia the hatred was held in
check by tyrannical government, and the old rivals had lived for a long
time as neighbors, but as soon as the yoke was lifted, the smoldering
hatreds burst into flame, and war and atrocity followed. The animal
kingdom was long thought to be immune, but research in the wild has
proved that chimpanzees and gorillas engage in inter-tribal warfare and
slaughter of infants.
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Is there a cure? Probably not. The best
we can hope for is to admit the presence of this evil instinct in each
of us and to attempt to educate everyone to be aware of it and to keep
it in check for the mutual benefit of society. In a modern society with
terrible weapons of mass destruction, cooperation has become more
necessary for survival than competition, though we may have to become
space travelers to ensure enough resources and territory for our
rapidly expanding population. We will probably encounter some aliens
that we can all hate together.
On Having Things Both Ways
How to succeed in life without really trying
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A Jewish Orthodox student who was admitted to Yale has launched a
lawsuit against the school, because they would not bend their rules
about all freshmen living in a dorm. He feared that he would see some
ill-behaved female student to the detriment of his immortal soul. Of
course, he would also have sued if Yale had refused to admit him
because Jewish Orthodox students cannot intermingle with the doomed,
non-chosen, ordinary students. He wants an equal chance to be admitted,
but expects non-equal treatment when he gets there, a disturbing trend
that is appearing among many minority individuals. Perhaps he would
prefer attending Yale Diversity instead of Yale University; the
classrooms would consist of long hallways flanked by little cubicles
where students hide behind curtained doors. If they hear something from
the professor in the hallway that interferes with what they already
KNOW, they can quickly slam the door shut. He could have attended a
religious school that would have catered willingly to his
sensitivities, but then he would lose that special networking power one
gets from attending an Ivy League college. Maybe he would be happy if
Yale would just send him the diploma without the bother of attending,
since he seems incapable of learning anything new, anyway.
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As another example of this trend of getting something because it is
attractive, then immediately trying to change it to suit your own
agenda, I refer to an article in the Smithsonian magazine. A lady
purchased a seafront cottage in a lobstering village because of the
quaint atmosphere. Now she complains to the city council because the
noise of lobster boats leaving the harbor early in the morning is
disturbing her sleep. May she succeed in turning the village into just
another suburban non-entity like the one she presumbly left behind!
Self-indulgence rules!
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