I actually dislike money in many respects, because I am a literal individualist, I'm saving money so I can buy property and just live on it, free from a daily life of repetition outside of basic chores and hygiene. I don't mind taking out the garbage, I do mind bending over 500 times a day to do some repetitive task. I have yet to find a job that I enjoy doing, because I like doing a little of lots of different thing, but not a lot of one thing.
Hope you'll have saved up enough money for years of property taxes, home maintenance, and utilities bills as well. Home ownership ain't all roses, you know
MSimon wrote:OK. Now tell me this: why are the well educated Europeans so gullible when it comes to socialism and the uneducated hick Americans so resistant?
Because educated people do not think in extremes like you do. We see that you can have balance between socialism and capitalism and still live well.
Though I have to admit that socialism is often going to far in Europe (people put me on the right here). But then your hicks are falling for the other direction, usually religion of some sort (promising eternal heaven). Trading the devil for the beelzebub, if you ask me.
I am for balance in everything and dont think in black and white. The world is grey.
Call me a moderate moderate
I was looking for an opportunity to post this where it was relevant. This looks like a good place. This guy makes a point that i'm always trying to make. WE didn't move.
Changing definitions and liberal prejudice Hugh MacKenzie My denomination's house organ had just published an article I had written on the whole issue of ordaining avowed and practicing homosexuals. Entitled, "Rev Smith Comes out of the Closet (It Was Getting too Crowded in There)", I thought it a wry little piece on the dangers of re-defining traditional marriage.
In my fictional piece, the Good Reverend was an avowed polygamist who was lobbying for his life style to be accepted. After all, there was MORE precedent for polygamy in both the Hebrew and Greek Scripttures than there was for homosexual unions. Why not?
Shortly there after, I received a rather cold phone call from an old classmate of mine from seminary days. He was passing through my area and wondered if we could meet for lunch. We met at that castle of culinary excellence, the Jersey Diner.
Chad wasted no time.
"What happened to you old friend? When did that witty and fun loving guy we all knew at seminary trun into a sour, sarcastic, conservative curmudgeon?!"
Obviously, he didn't know me well at seminary. Contrarianism AND sarcasm are my Scottish birth rites and I grew up with masters of these arts.
We went at it for through the soup course and I decided I was in the presence of a rather priggish TRUE BELIEVER, Liberal branch. Actually the liberal has become the new Fundamentalist. Logic and rational argument were not going to move his heart or mind. So, I decided on a little show-and-tell.
I took the salt and pepper shakers and placed them in the middle of the table between us. In the gap between the two I placed the catsup bottle ( Hunt's not Heinz ) equi-distant between the two.
"Chad. I am the catsup bottle right there in the middle of the right and left wings of our church. I am what I was in seminary; a moderate Calvinist...haven't changed much at all."
I then took the shaker on his left and moved it all the way over to the very edge of the booth's table.
"Notice where the left wing has gone these past 20 years...ever leftward. Now, even though I haven't changed, where has this migration deposited me?"
"Well, I guess on the extreme right wing," he replied.
" And the fairness in that would be where?"
Take that lesson over from a sectarian application to politics these last few years. During this time the Boomers have come into their radical own. You might well be the same moderate conservative you always were but now YOU are a veritable right wing, bomb throwing, swastika waving, nut job fascist...'Who me?!" Yes YOU, at least in their eyes.
And the True Believers will always see you and your conservatism, however mild, as radical and ultimately dangerous to their statist designs.
