"Greenman, post: 40193916, member: 2751"
There really isn't anything to defend.
M: You said, "Because it was convenient. I agreed with you, but I asked that you defend that statement by explaining exactly what you mean by convenient because I may mean something completely different with that word than you do. You should be able to defend what you mean by convenient is the real reason. And you begin to explain yourself here:
G: Someone has to deal with homeless people that sometimes become violent, send in the police.
M: a typical conservative response to fear
G: Schools gave up the entire concept of discipline, so they need police on campus to maintain order.
M: You should recognize that this need to maintain order is a very conservative thingi because the conservative brain is wired to react to uncertainty and chaos with fear. Liberals who concentrate in educational systems were first in line to rectify the notion the teaching to the hickory stick is dangerous to children's minds, that curiosity and the love of learning are what will motivate academic excellence. The convenience was that there was no money for real educational reform.
G: Even parents have been using police to control the children they couldn't be bothered raising properly. For all of these things it was cheaper and a lot easier to hand it to the police than to deal with the underlying issues or face the tough decisions.
M: Again, it is conservatives not liberals that won't pay the kind of taxes needed to make real reform happen.
G: We created the entire problem, we handed it to law enforcement, now we're pissed of that they didn't do a better job than us.
M: Not we, but conservatives created the problem and handed it to law enforcement and now still demand they fix the problem they were handed. They are pissed because they handed the problem to their own creation and conservatives couldn't do shit.
G: Now we're going to try to reinvent law enforcement, because that's better than admitting that we fucked it up to begin with. I don't believe that we're bright enough to do that.
M: Of course you don't believe we're bright enough to do that because the we you refer to is the ones we see in the mirror.
Convenient for a conservative is called rationalization: anything that keeps negative emotions from surfacing and scaring the bejesus out of them. But the important point to me is this matter of 'fucking up'. Nobody fucked up. Everybody did the best the could within the limits of their conditioning. If you weren't conditioned to fear fucking up you wouldn't nearly as often. You love others, but you lack faith that all people are basically good. You were raised as though only fear would keep you from that path and we become what we fear.
There are lots of bumps in the road ahead but we need to evolve toward more liberal reasoning if we are to survive. Have faith in people. Only the humility of the recognition we don't know all the answers will allow us to seek for better solutions than the ones we thought would work in the past. We grow or we go extinct.