> > My dad, apparently, caved. > >That is not how I see it. He was apparently working for some self-serving >ass-hole, and had to do what was needed to continue to provide for his >family.
Actually, I suspect he regretted it. At the time he was quite young, very marketable college degree, very good job market, just one child, a wife with professional skills who was able to choose to stop working. He had options, and quitting was a reasonable one. As the years went by, sometimes he took hard stands "on principle" that hurt the people closest to him; at other times he did what seemed expedient. He was not consistent, and not always strong--and in those things I am very much like him, and we are both very much like many other people. (I am much, much older than he was when he made that decision.) Much later, while, again, working for the same company (after a relatively brief period of successful self-employment), and after choosing to live in a liberal college town, he undertook a quixotic and unsuccessful run for the school board on a very similar platform. Early in my adult life I dropped out of a safe and remunerative career in a state bureaucracy, took a major pay cut, and got involved in the not-for-profit Independent Living movement, because I could not stand the compromises I was being asked to make. Of course, I had no children, no desire to "rise", and no real pressure from custom or family to do so. It actually seemed like the easiest thing to do at the time, and it was the right decision for me. >Unfortunately there are a lot of idiots who use their "apparent >positions of authority" to bully their way through countless subordinates. >Hell should have a special place for jerks like that. We may not like it, >but our society, and others, always seem to allow (even encourage) such poor >behavior. Lately it's been a fad to proclaim loudly that greed, boorishness, bullying, selfishness and other similar things are actually beneficial, positive human traits that lead to a more efficient and prosperous society. Well, it's not a new fad--remember Social Darwinism?--but it's found renewed support under a different name. My central observation is that it's kind of tragic as well as kind of funny when people who believe intensely in their own ability to always be King of the Hill get pushed off the hill by somebody meaner and tougher than they are, and then they complain that it wasn't fair, that the game was rigged. Of course it's rigged--but some people will get up, brush themselves off, start climbing, and get pushed back down in the mud over and over before they'll admit that, because admitting that means they must truly be incapable of "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps". Meanwhile, the people at the top suffer from no such illusions--they know they were born half way up on the gradual slope, that they pushed and pulled each other the rest of the way in a textbook demonstration of "it takes a village", and that their hands remain clean because they've hired a legion of thugs to push anybody off who gets too close. And I think that's about as OT as I've ever been here. Ken www.stic-cil.org _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
