$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('uNkNowN ElEmEnt', 'I')ts personal choice. Even people with little resources who could be called "down and out" still have a few choices they could have made differently or could still make differently.
PeakOil is You
THE Homeless Thread (merged)
Re: CNN On New Homelessness
by vision-master » Mon 19 May 2008, 12:08:19
They may not actually be able to "make a choice." When people fall on hard times, they often become depressed. Depressed people have extreme difficulty making decisions or changing their behavior. It's difficult to know what this is like unless you've felt it yourself.
What a blessing depression can be.
- vision-master
Re: CNN On New Homelessness
by TheDude » Mon 19 May 2008, 12:21:16
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('misterno', 'I') don't get it, why doesn't she move to a cheaper city? She can live much better with $8/hr in a different city.
I think she is an idiot
I think she is an idiot
Note also that she's 67.
How far can she get out of SOCAL with no job or money, trying to find work at that age in a totally strange city?
Imagine trying to live out of your car in a cold climate, too.
NeoGypsy #2 is also living with 4 cats. You can't bond with a pack of MREs it seems!
And her biggest problem is hygiene...
uNkNowN ElEmEnt - that's a terrible joke! Very misogynistic. Hard to forget, too.
Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
And let me tell you something: I dig your work.
And let me tell you something: I dig your work.
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Re: CNN On New Homelessness
by DomusAlbion » Mon 19 May 2008, 12:31:06
This is how it all falls apart.
First the edges crumble, then cracks begin to run to the center, opening into fissures.
Bigger and bigger chunks fall away until there is little left but rubble.
Welcome to Dystopia.
First the edges crumble, then cracks begin to run to the center, opening into fissures.
Bigger and bigger chunks fall away until there is little left but rubble.
Welcome to Dystopia.
"Modern Agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
-- Albert Bartlett
"It will be a dark time. But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
-- James Lovelock
-- Albert Bartlett
"It will be a dark time. But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
-- James Lovelock
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Re: CNN On New Homelessness
by Ludi » Mon 19 May 2008, 12:50:39
I think that a lot of people will just end up sitting hopelessly, not able to adjust to their new circumstances. Without a mutual support network in place, many people will probably not be able to take any action to help themselves. Remember in New Orleans it was just a small group of people (I think a couple of paramedics) who gathered a large group of people together for mutual support and to try to escape the city. Without these kinds of leaders, it will be hard or even impossible for a lot of people to take action. 
- Ludi
Re: CNN On New Homelessness
by TWilliam » Mon 19 May 2008, 13:52:51
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'W')ithout these kinds of leaders, it will be hard or even impossible for a lot of people to take action.
Ahhh yes... another of those wonderful 'benefits' of modern public education; the inability to take effective self-directed action. Gotta have an 'authority figure' to tell you what to do...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '5'). INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I'm told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.
Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but that happens less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. No middle-class parents I have ever met actually believe that their kid's school is one of the bad ones. Not one single parent in twenty-six years of teaching. That's amazing and probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.
Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained to be dependent: the social-service businesses could hardly survive; they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, prepared-food and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as well, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year.
Don't be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do. It's one of the biggest lessons I teach.
(emphasis added)
From The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto...
Last edited by TWilliam on Mon 19 May 2008, 14:07:04, edited 1 time in total.
"It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas? Is goin' bye-bye... "
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