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A Usenet persona calling itself KMAN wrote:
in article , Scott Weiser at wrote on 3/22/05 11:57 PM: A Usenet persona calling itself KMAN wrote: Ah. So you start holding a child accountable for their own future starting with infancy. No, I hold the parents accountable. But the child suffers. Then perhaps the state should take custody of the child, award custody to someone better able to raise the child, and garnish the parent's wages to pay for the child's care...after eliminating any welfare payments to the parents to stimulate them to get a job. Wow, for a guy who seems so freaked out about freedom, you are a bit of a control freak when it comes to other people! Am I? Or am I merely attempting to elicit some sort of reasoned argument out of you? Born to parents who could not afford to send you to school? Tough titties for you, this ain't the land of opportunity. You confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. No, I don't, actually. There is no equality of opportunity for a child born into a poor family who cannot access education or health care. Wrong. You are hopeless if you really believe that. In this country, opportunities are abundant. There are millions uponn millions of success stories of poor people who have persevered and succeeded. That's WHY a million people a month illegally enter this country. In the Sudan, there are no opportunities for education or health care, but in North America there are opportunities everywhere. All a parent has to do is go and seek it out and resolve to be successful. A child who grows up in poverty does not have equality of opportunity with a child from a wealthy family. If you think otherwise, you are insane. I'll grant you that a child of poverty may not have the same quality of opportunities available to the children of the rich, but that does not mean the opportunities do not nonetheless abound. No one has "equal opportunity" with everyone else, rich or poor, because the major part of "opportunity" is the individual's willingness to seize it and make it work, in spite of obstacles. In fact, in most cases, it is the obstacles themselves that stimulate the drive to succeed that results in success. Many's the rich child who's failed in business because he hasn't learned how to overcome adversity. And many's the poor child who has succeeded beyond everyone's wildest expectations because of a resolve to overcome adversity. Understanding access to education and health care as fundamental human rights helps to give those born into a poverty a chance. But is "access" inevitably the same thing as "entitlement?" America is indeed the "Land of Opportunity," but the opportunities are not all positive opportunities. You have an equal opportunity to FAIL as well as succeed. That's what causes people to strive to excel and advance. As Linda Seebach said once, "The only way to make everyone equal is to squash everyone flat." You can't have an equal opportunity to anything if you are hungry, uneducated, and without access to health care. Sure you can. Go to a shelter, get a meal, go find a Catholic hospital and seek medical care and go find a job to pay for your education. That gives you an equal opportunity to someone who is born into a wealthy family, never has to know a hungry belly, has tutors, can afford any tuition they require, and does not have to work while studying? It gives you adequate opportunity to succeed if you're willing to fight for it. Getting everything as a gift is not, contrary to your assertion, a guarantee of success. In fact, in many cases, it's a guarantee of failure. Just look at Paris Hilton if you don't believe me. Most of the great entrepeneurs of this country weren't rich to begin with, and many of them started out as "poor children." The difference between them and a ghetto child is primarily an unswerving resolve not to be bound to poverty. FYI, not every community has a Catholic hospital around the corner. Almost every community has a federally-funded hospital at which even the indigent can receive emergency care. If there's not one in that community, then perhaps it's time to move to a community that has more charitable resources available for the poor. You are living in a dreamland of selfish ignorance. Nope. I'm just not buying your "the poor are helpless victims" mentality. Parents are not stimulated to encourage, assist, stimulate, enlighten, browbeat, badger, threaten and otherwise require scholarship on the part of their children if they see no future for them because the dole is all they know. Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he can feed the world. How ironic, to use the "teach him to fish" analogy while saying that poor people should not have access to education. I didn't say they shouldn't have access to education, I said that public education is a dismal failure and that nobody should *expect* a free public education as a "right" to be paid for by somebody else. If it's not a right, then it doesn't have to be provided, and selfish prigs like yourself obviously aren't going to support it. So what? If you think it's important, then YOU support it or provide it. There are nearly unlimited educational opportunities out there, even for the very poor, that either cost them nothing (charitable institutions) or merely require some nominal input to qualify. There are vocational programs sponsored by industry specifically targeted at the disadvantaged explicitly to teach them a valuable skill that will be of use to the industry. The opportunities are everywhere. All one needs to do is reach out and grab one. I don't think that I child born into poverty should have such vastly different opportunities than those afforded children born into wealth. Then adopt a poor child and give him better opportunities. If you want to learn to fish, go to the dock and demonstrate to a ship captain that you are eager and willing to work hard in exchange for his teaching you how to fish. Quid pro quo. As simple as that. LOL. You forget, the rich people have already overfished the stock and there's no jobs. Then take up another line of work and do the same thing. We need ditch diggers, trash collectors and custodians too. Not everybody can be the CEO of Ford. The worst thing about a liberal arts degree is that some of the graduates might be capable of thinking. True, but sadly, almost universally, they fail to realize that potential, largely thanks to the pervasive leftist/liberal apologetics of failure and muddled thinking taught to them on most of our college campuses. Rare indeed is the student who is able to rise above the leftist propaganda and demagogary to reach a state of enlightenment and understanding, and every one who does is universally a conservative thinker. In your fantasy world. Is George W. Bush one of your elightened right-wing graduates? LOL. His college grades were much higher than Kerry's, and slightly more than half the voting population of the country find him to be sufficiently intelligent to be President of the United States. You didn't really answer the question. Sure I did. You just didn't understand the answer. FYI, money and a name can buy a lot of things, including college grades. Do you have any credible evidence that this is the case? -- Regards, Scott Weiser "I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM Š 2005 Scott Weiser |
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