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Old 03-14-2015, 15:25   #121
GratefulCitizen
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What is "America"?

America is not a set of laws.
America is not a collection of governmental structures.

America is not a collection of people who recognize and assimilate to a particular cultural heritage.
If any of these things happen, it is a consequence, not a cause.

America is an idea.
The future is in promoting and protecting that idea.

Promoting and protecting is complex and involves many aspects.
First and foremost: winning hearts and minds.

So what is the "idea"?

America is this:
Your rights, and implicit responsibility of respecting others' rights, are inherent in your being.
They can neither be granted to you nor taken from you by the opinion of another.

There is the reality that power and influence are not equally distributed among mankind.
Life, liberty, and property can and will be unjustly granted or taken according to the power of some.

This injustice is just a fact.
"Unjust" droughts and floods also happen.

The first step in this battle for "America" is to free men's minds.
Teach them the difference between the limited liberty of external circumstances and the unlimited freedom of how they process that fact within their own minds.

The idea that our rights are inherent in our being implies an ideal world where all men will respect those rights in others.
The "ideal" will never be reached in this fallen world, and every one of us will die eventually.

Teach men that, during their limited time, whatever big or small part they play in pursuing that ideal is a life well spent.
Once the fire is burning within their hearts and minds, they will seek the like-minded, and practical work can then be done.

Keep the focus on the idea.
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Old 03-14-2015, 15:52   #122
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Javadrinker View Post
Pat, I thought it is like 900 channels
It may well be, but I couldn't find a youtube clip that said 900. I wouldn't know anyway, we've only got one and don't watch it.

Pat
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Old 03-15-2015, 06:24   #123
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Originally Posted by Broadsword2004 View Post
It would be interesting to do a comparison on citizen involvement in social and political affairs between rural America and urban America.
That would be interesting, if one could better define rural/urban in more representative categories. Couple of articles I saw tended to contrast one extreme with the other (a major metro area with tee-totaling, church-attending factory-closed tumbleweed-ville). There's much territory in between - all those places that encompass the smaller hives but a bunch of real estate - who find their lives driven by the 1 or 2 major metro areas in a given state. The voting trends are probably easily acquired; seeing how that is driven by local social interactions, what kinds, and what drives that social participation in the first place is likely a tougher nut to crack.
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Old 03-24-2015, 08:08   #124
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I wasn't sure which thread this would be best added to being sure that an existing thread would be best. I figured this could continue the discussion on the decline of American Exceptionalism....

LINK

LINK

In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas

KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”

Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.

Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea.

But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.

This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer space.” The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows. The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that “making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.”


Cont at link....
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