<p>As I suspected. Americans give a lot of money to run their churches. Almost all of the money donated to churches goes to paying staff and keeping the building open, NOT to serving the poor. Although of course most churches play a part in social support, it represents a tiny fraction of the money they take in. Keeping a church open and staffed is expensive. Europeans in general are much less involved in church. Americans also give a lot of money to educational institutions that in Europe are supported by the state.</p>
<p>For that matter, I would venture to guess that most of American charitable giving that actually goes to the poor provides support that in Europe is provided by the state. In Europe, people show their generosity by voting to support a social support network through their taxes.</p>
<p>I learned (from my daughter’s middle-school social studies textbook, of all places) that there were two very different and distinct points of view among the colonists, and that these points of view were shaped by geography.</p>
<p>In the southern colonies, with deep, navigable rivers, it was possible for people to set up on their own piece of land and take responsibility for themselves and their families independently. They traded directly with people who came along the rivers, hire teachers to teach their children individually on their own plantations, and made a virtue of self-sufficiency.</p>
<p>In New England, where the geography is different, life grew up around towns near harbors, with communal institutions such as churches, community schools, town halls, and a division of labor where some people farmed, some people were merchants and traders, etc. In this setting, collaboration and interdependency was a virtue. </p>
<p>I come from a culture that has not lived an agricultural lifestyle for hundreds and hundreds of years, because my ancestors were not permitted to own land. Therefore, interdependency is expected and valued and “self-sufficiency” is simply not something I think is important. By this I do not mean that I think people should expect to be provided for by the government or by others; I mean only that it is a given that people will help one another–they will give and they will receive; they will exchange goods and services; they will work together and there will be communal institutions that benefit everyone. It troubles me to see the triumph of self-sufficiency over collaboration as THE “American value,” when I believe that both approaches to life in society were at one time considered American values.</p>
I think a society in which the vast majority of people are self sufficient is the ideal we should strive for. With a safety net only for those who can’t care for themselves.</p>
<p>I don’t know my neighbors and have no interest in doing so. I can’t imagine why the mere fact of accidental real estate purchasing would make someone desirable as an acquaintance. If it happened that some of my neighbors had something in common with me, great, but otherwise I mind my business and expect them to do the same. Of course my next door neighbors are the people who strolled over and removed the pavers from my retaining wall.</p>
<p>I’m not a fan of racism, your sarcasm aside. It horrifies and disgusts me the least desirable people in Mexican society are tossed out like refuse. But since I actually work with them, I don’t find their misery an object of amusement.</p>
<p>
And how do you know she’s not? Whether she is or is not a threat, what she is not is better than anyone else waiting their turns and the rules apply to even people who have your sympathy.</p>
<p>The question isn’t whether people provide services or goods on which other people rely in providing goods or services on which other people rely, and on which they all receive compensation that allows them to care for themselves and their families, the issue is providing a safety net for the small group who actually can’t and helping those who can but don’t learn how to do so.</p>
<p>Self-sufficiency and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. We can value those who take care of themselves and their families and help others all at the same time.</p>
<p>I am saying unequivocally that Mexican society is racist and, as a result, there is staggering human misery which crosses my path. And I find it not in the least amusing.</p>
<p>It took my boss’s tall, Pakistani-Muslim, doctor wife over three years to get here. They were both fine with the process and are living really well here now and contributing lots to American society. Because they feel grateful and not entitled. Boy are we lucky to have them!</p>
<p>We have a modern myth of the rugged frontiersman that seems romantic and has become sort of a national totem but really is (IMO) more of a cartoon character than anything else. Another example from my “neck of the woods” following on that Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett idea. My neighbor’s family is from a small town in Northwestern Washington. When his mother died I went up to her memorial (because that’s what neighbors do). This town is a little island of bluegrass and Assemblies of God - completely different that other places in the vicinity. Why? because it was settled by people coming from Appalachia for gold then railroads and timber jobs. All those hard headed Scotts Irish individual mountain men had the same idea and headed for the same place individually together where their descendents still live in community with a soundtrack of Loretta Lynn and Bill Monroe.</p>
<p>An interesting thread. There is a tension in America about how we define both “liberty” and “society”. Some people - notably those who call themselves libertarian but also others - define “liberty” as their economic freedom. They define “society” as a collection of individual actors bound as loosely as possible - except of course for specific moral impositions (which I noted in an earlier comment). They argue this is the essence of America and that is its history. Some go so far as to say this is God’s plan for the US and the more we do this the more God will reward us - and will punish us for failing. </p>
<p>The other point of view, which is more reflective of actual American history, is a mixture of the individual and the collective. “Liberty” in the colonies, for example, was strictly limited; personal conduct was limited by moral and economic regulation. I’m not merely speaking of Roger Williams leaving the Bay Colony so he could escape religious regulation. “Society” was highly defined, from guilds in trades to indentured servitude. It’s complicated.</p>
<p>An example: a major source of friction between colonists and natives in NE - and elsewhere but the documentation in NE is better - was feral pigs. The scrub farmers, considered at the bottom of the social ladder, used to release pigs to forage because it was cheaper than penning, which required not only labor and materials to build and maintain but meant you had to feed the pigs. Problem: the pigs ate the natives’ crops. Next problem: the natives would kill the pigs. Next problem: the colonists would attack the natives. What happened? As is typical in the US, an individualist and a collectivist approach: individuals were arrested and put on trial for destroying native crops - and sometimes for attacking friendly natives (though not as often as natives were put on trial for attacking a colonist) but the society wasn’t strong enough to enforce the rules about penning the freaking pigs. There are examples of judgements for natives for crop damage. There are cases of individuals, mostly native, tried for murder relating to the pigs. This meant the problem continued until it blossomed into war. It was eventually “settled” by the overwhelming fact that a lot of white people came and turned the land into farms. </p>
<p>There is a lot in this kind of history. The settlers didn’t see the natives as people who should be respected and they were able to get away with that because the larger society paid only lip service to the recognized rights and claims of the natives. That is a combination of individualism and collectivism at many levels. Including the simple fact that these settlers were largely considered what we might now call “white trash” and so all this, all the interactions, were occurring at the margins of what was then society. If we focus on the “white trash”, do we really want to say they are America? They are the “individualists” here. If we don’t, then we focus on the tightly bound, rules driven, restrictive society that was settled America. That’s not all of what we are either.</p>
<p>The thing I find incomprehensible about libertarian nonsense is the idea that liberty can so be constrained to be what libertarians say it is. All of the Founding Fathers would roll in the graves to think of liberty in that way. The thing that really bothers me is the distortion of history to justify a single perspective like that. If there is a single message from all the founding individuals, it’s that each of them had his own view of what constituted liberty and that the founding documents reflect a series of compromises in wording and coverage that embody the wide array of meaning.</p>
<p>Maybe you are constrained by your own definition of “libertarian.” In its broadest sense, libertarians want people to be able to pursue and achieve whatever they want, without a lot of government restriction.</p>
<p>^^ Like the bankers of Wall Street circa 2007? That worked out pretty well for those individuals, not so much for the rest of us. But almost everything they did was perfectly legal, thanks to the loosening of those terrible awful “government restrictions” over the last 30 years. Destroying an economy while personally pocketing millions – that’s the endgame of libertarianism.</p>
<p>That’s certainly true. But some community service can be an eye-opener. My D volunteered with our church group to help serve meals at a homeless shelter, principally because she needed to check that box. I went along too. It was a major eye-opener for both of us to see the cross-section of people -ages, races, dress, mental functioning - who rely on that safety net for the most basic human requirement. Particularly telling were the families with children, young children.</p>
<p>So telling that the next time our church was called on to serve the meal, both D and I signed up again, even though by that time she’d completed all the necessary hours.</p>