Shibaguyz
First of all Kayleigh – don’t be so dismissive of my post. Of course I read your post. Of course I understand what you are saying. Don’t dismiss the point I am making by saying that I didn’t even read your post. We can start another thread where you can post your feelings at length about natural medicines and then post your scientific evidence pro and con. Then you won’t have to listen to my anecdotal evidence. Happy?
Soc – interesting, well thought out post. Now… what’s the answer? How do we restructure an entire society/economic system to that working mom has the same commensurate pay as the stock brocker?
I agree that “race” as a whole is a societal construct since, it can be argued (quite convincingly), that there is no such thing as “race.” Therefore, race is not really a valid basis for any argument. However, bring up the race card or the gay card in a political campaign and you’ve just hit the mother lode of campaign contributions! These are issues that are easy to talk about it in both vague or overblown language depending on your agenda. And I’m not talking dem/repub, lib/conser here… it falls on both party lines.
It is easy to scare people into drawing lines by making general statements that are difficult to pin down to one arguing point. It is also easy to throw around what sound like convincing arguments about how a certain sector of the population lives if the people you are talking to aren’t likely to know much about those other folks or will ever run into them.
This is, I believe, the basis for “race” or class-ism in our particular case: the constructs that have been given to us by our political system that has found its primary money maker to be our fear of the unknown.
I had a sociology professor at Seattle Central years ago who really opened my eyes to such issues and really made me rethink the way I was looking at the world based on where my viewpoint were coming from and what constructs they were based.
So, again Soc, what’s the answer? How do we stop this? We can talk about it all day but, until we come up with some solutions, we’re just bitching. And, the cool thing about a forum like this is, we don’t HAVE TO AGREE on one solution!! We can all have different ways we can deal with this then go out and make those actions take hold.
Thank you for posting intelligent, well thought out questions and responses, Soc.