Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith

  • Mood:

POLITICS: States that give, states that get

Of the states that get more money than they give, 84% are Republican.
Of the states that give more money than they get, 78% are Democratic.
NOW who's redistributing wealth unfairly?
Details here.
Tags: economics, politics
Subscribe

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    default userpic

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    When you submit the form an invisible reCAPTCHA check will be performed.
    You must follow the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of use.
  • 102 comments
The question then (for me, and it's why I have been writing so much) is: how do you foster a sense of community? And what destroyed ours?

(I have to say: the way we're going about politics is not helping. We do not need Two Americas. Comments like that posted first to this entry make me want to take my toys and my pennies and go home. I actually have been sitting on my hands for days now, trying to decide whether I was brave enough to respond to anything in ysabetwordsmith's journal even though I've known her for over a decade and count her as a sister. I'm a little afraid even now that someone is going to come along and start trolling. :P )
I wanted to get back to your questions about community. I don't know what broke ours, or even when it happened. I would surmise that the whispers of that breaking have always existed, in the human need to think in terms of "us" and "them." That's the core breakdown of community.

This goes back to diversity..."us" and "them" - until we can look around us and see that we are all human, that it doesn't matter that our neighbor to the left worships in a mosque, and the one on the right has a different-hued skin, and the one across the street is Democrat...none of that matters. Until we see everyone as us, there will be no true sense of community.

And someone reminded me this morning about something Obama said "There is not a liberal America, and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America, and a white America, and a Latino America, and an Asian America - there is the United States of America." I'm not sure what he said is really true today, this morning as the recriminations continue and the hatred and fear feeds on itself...but I think, if we want it enough and are willing to work towards it, we can all make that statement true. All of us - no matter what our political leanings may be, no matter who we choose to pray to, no matter how dark or light our skin might be, no matter where our ancestors might have come from.

It's time for our diversity to become our strength again, and time for us to realize that despite our differences, we are all "us". From there, we need to spread that truth across the planet.
>> It's time for our diversity to become our strength again, and time for us to realize that despite our differences, we are all "us". From there, we need to spread that truth across the planet. <<

This is something that each of us can work towards, because the river of our nation's will is created by the raindrops of our citizens. Every choice we make on an individual level becomes part of the current that determines whether we celebrate diversity or try to homogenize everything.