(01-12-2018 06:42 PM)NewTimes Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 06:26 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 05:57 PM)NewTimes Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 05:42 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 05:29 PM)NewTimes Wrote:  So as long as things are personally good for you then you're okay. As long as the economy keeps humming and the oil and gas industries succeed, and your taxes are constant that's okay. I just come from a position of a different world view.

I’d call that holding the faux moral high ground.

Not really. Your world view seems to be noninclusive of others. And as a society in which we live, we are not islands to ourselves.

You asked why I would vote. I answered in direct terms.

I think if any worldview was noninclusive it would be the one that cannot understand that people have personal interests at all instead of a manufactured sense of collective need, i.e. ideological.

I could go into my ideological reasons but your question didn't hint at them. On the other hand, you seem to insinuate that you think only in terms of ideology.

But, to bring it all back to your retort, I am not concerned about your need to satisfy any sense of collective, or personal, guilt much less your personal need to satisfy your imagined obligations to society--such as you see it and them.

I'm as capitalistic as they come having run a small business until March of this year when I retired to Florida. I've not been contemplating my navel living in an ashram. Having just made a trip out west in Washington, Oregon and California, I was amazed at the number of homeless people sleeping on streets. Here in Daytona, homelessness is a problem with beggars at the Wal-Mart and along International Speedway Drive. I use the homelessness as a point. I could close my eyes and say it does not exist. I live in a gated community and it does not effect me at all, until I leave my compound. I'm not a bleeding heart, tree hugging liberal wanting to save the whales. And I am perceptive enough to know it is a societal problem that effects me. Millions of local tax dollars are being spent to build a homeless shelter. And one can take this one example, in one Florida city and replicate it hundreds if not thousands of times over. So a blend of living comfortably and being aware of one's immediate, regional and national environment seems like the wise position. And the challenge is what to do to fix the problem and the inequity. And congrats of your recent senate elections.

Building a shelter doesn't solve the problem. Simply feeding them won't solve the problem. Many of them won't go there or will continue their self-destructive behavior. Atlanta is a very liberal city and they have been working for a couple of decades to close the Pine Street shelter. It operated on the philosophy of give a man a fish. As a result, you just had a mass of homeless who never learned to fish.

Much of the west coast encourages the behavior instead of trying to solve the problem. Many of these people have substance abuse problems. Many have mental illness. Many are vets with variations of PTSD. Simply opening a shelter doesn't change the trajectory of their life.