TimJ

Yes. Your incredibly small, tightly focused view of the world is really all you need to inform all your decisions and all your knowledge. What you see, through your one pair of eyes, is far more informative than anything you could ever read. You're seriously self-absorbed. Lost of people are. You might see it when you see some single person driving a hummer but you sure don't see it when you look in the mirror.

Unfortunately for the world, and fortunate for guys like you who want to think everything is a consequence of personal will, societies are alive. They breathe and grow and change over time, and the character of societies is shaped by many factors but for liberal democracies, I'd say it's mostly shared experience and the influence (or lack thereof) of wealth. We have gone through so many ebbs and flows in this country but the bedrock has always been a liberal society of shared destinies. We fought the civil war because seccession went against both. We have been quite egalitarian and quite economically amoral, but for the most part we've always fought back to a place of shared destiny.

Until fairly recently. See it's unfortunate that societies are alive for the worst off because sometimes they can turn into real idiotic jerks. You have no idea, no concept of the context behind the black experience here in the US so you see some black dudes (saying you don't care what color a person is means you're talking about blacks or mexicans- every time) hanging out doing nothing, in your self-obsessed worldview you say to yourself "proof!". Me, well, I probably see a shiftless, lazy dude too, but I know that dude didn't fall from the sky and I know his situation, his view on the world, his shiftless and laziness, isn't exactly of his own making. Sure, he owns responsibility to himself and he should/could pull himself up, but... see I know there's millions upon billions of conditions and consequences and realities out there that people are living under right now that I will never even be able to understand, and knowing how government works, knowing how money flows, knowing my history, I know problems can become institutional. I know problems can become like a cancer and move through communities and time. I know I'm a product of nature and nurture and so don't really see a hero in the mirror simply because I'm not lazy and shiftless.

I know endemic, systemic problems can persist, through no real fault of any one person or group of people caught in that situation, but guys like you don't understand that, so when a society turns into a jerk and abandons all pretense to shared destiny and shared experience, the reality only reinforces your conviction that you're just as right as anyone else, and the only guy you need to rely on is you. I used to think that way. Used to think everything outside of me was just another agenda trying to worm it's way in. Then I wised the hell up.

Of course you do. You're small-minded and have no regard for the maintenence of soceity, don't understand how a person better off, 100 miles away, benefits you in the least.