I've found another term to name something that I don't think should exist.
The first was working poor. Ever since I learned about Teddy Roosevelt's idea of a living wage, I've agreed with him that anyone who works full time should earn enough money to live on. Maybe not live in any kind of luxury, but enough to survive. The idea that a nation that claims to be so civilized could have people who work full time and still can't pay their bills is disgusting to me.
The second term that shouldn't exist I got from Wes. He told me about what he calls nineteen-year-old has-beens, those guys who graduated last spring but they hang around at after-school football practice, wishing they were still out there. There are thousands of these people. They're not all guys, and it's not always football that attracts them, but they grow up to be the Al Bundy's of the world, constantly re-living their time in high school because nothing since then has been as good.
While we as a society have been taking rigorous education out of schools, we've also been turning them into the social hub of students' lives, so that afterward life seems never so fun, never so exciting again. It's shameful: no one as young as nineteen should ever think the best part of their life is over.
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The newest addition to my collection I heard from Anna Greenberg, senior vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, when she was interviewed on the News Hour with(out) Jim Lehrer on June 30.
During a segment on how candidates have to struggle to fight disinformation and rumours, she referred to the low-information voter, a group that is particularly susceptible to incorrect information (and, I suspect, the people that make Fox Noise so popular). She even described how some of them resist information: "If they get a piece of information they don't like, they assume it's not true."
Low-information voters are something else that just shouldn't exist. In order for democracy to work, voter have to know what's going on. Uninformed and ignorant people are just too easy to lie to, to mislead with bogus information, and these people should not be voting.
To be honest, I can't think of a fair way to stop them from exercising their rights -- short of some kind of current events test before they're allowed to register to vote -- but there must be something that can be done. Jefferson said it years ago: "Democracy requires an educated electorate."
And Wes talks about this too; he likes to say that he believes in the power of enlightened self-interest, but we don't have enough enlightened people to make it work any more.
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2 comments:
nineteen-year-old-has-beens ...
i recall a song, i think by springsteen, "dreaming about glory days"? (i'm too lazy to research it). i thnk it was on that topic.
for many people who live in a small town and won't be leaving it, high school is the best time of their life. after they graduate, they are nothing.
There are only biased assholes who don't care what other people think, and who will lie about their motivations upto the expected biases of their interrogators. these people know what's going on but have reached the cynical conclusion that truth DOESNOT matter. So, anything can be said as a representation, since virtue, let alone the virtues of tuth are ineefectual in their realities.
so they'll let themselves be identified by this pejorative so they don't have to waste energy arguing and defending their provocative biases that they hold because theycan and will hold them for as LONG A THEY LIKE, not because of any justification, as if they needed a justification.
They are the vindication of subjective rationalizing.
Black Bugsy
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