🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1994Dec31.130042.1548@bbs.sd68.nanaimo.bc.ca>, Merv Unger <munger@bbs.sd68.nanaimo.bc.ca> writes...
>> In article <1994Dec31d-gooch states Lefties' just don't have an appropriate party to vote for.  The NDP
>> has let us down a lot.
> 
>There's no need for another left wing party. All we need is a little
>common sense, left and right. For instance, a proper minimum wage would
>keep a lot of people OFF welfare if they found that they were better
>off by working than on the dole.
>The social net should be available for those in TRUE need only. Toss
>able-bodied single people off the welfare roles and INCREASE the amount
>paid to single parent situations. Nobody seems to want to address this
>approach.

Sounds pretty left wing to me.  The biggest problem in this country is
that everybody wants to deal with the side effects of a bad economy and 
poverty, but they don't deal with the roots.  I have an interesting analogy
for this.  Imagine if you will that we all have to take turns on a trapeze
swing in a circus. To protect ourselves if we fall, we have a safety net
which we all hold.  Normally there isn't a problem.  You get up on the swing,
do a couple of acts and your're fine.  People don't fall off very often because
they are well prepared for it and there are enough swings to jump to, but
every now and them someone does fall off.  It's not serious though because
there aren't that many falling off.  We can all hold that net with just one
finger.  Now imagine if you will that we stop preparing people to go up
on the swings and we don't have enough swings for people to jump to.  More
and more people fall off and we have to hold that net with an entire hand.
The longer it goes on, the worse it gets and now we have to hold on with both 
hands.  We're getting pretty tired.  What's worse is that those people who
keep falling off are getting bruised and tired themselves and aren't so good
at holding that net up.  Now what government and business want us to do is
go back to holding that net with just one finger.  The people holding the
net are a little less tired now but now people are crashing right through to
the floor because there isn't enough holding the net up.  What's worse is that
the people holding the net up's children are the next to try the trapeze.
Obviously this approach isn't going to work.  If we were making sure that
the people on the trapeze were prepared to be there and there were enough
swings to jump to, however, we would go back naturally to holding that net
with just one finger.  We wouldn't have people hitting the floor either.
	What we need is two things: preparation and opportunity.  Preperation
goes much furthur than just education and I think this is what a lot of
people forget.  Everything that goes on in society is linked to everything
else.  You can't just look at that single teenage mom on welfare and blame
her.  You have to look at the reasons she got there in the first place.
I don't think the middle class usually realizes this because it is so easy
to judge.  We are very quick to say `lock him up and throw away the key'
when someone commits a crime but once we realize that criminals, single
parents on welfare (who didn't want to be in their position), the unemployed,
and all the others which are so inconviently using up our social program
resources are just a product of problems in our society, we would try to
address the REASONS and ROOTS to our problems and our `problem people'.

`Opportunity' is tomorrow's class.