Names

Saturday September 8, 2007 - 3:14PM EDT

I think if I have kids I want one to have a name of African heritage. African is way too broad, maybe a masai or ebo name.  I'll find a group and pick one.

Speaking of culture things. Did I ever mention I've grown tired of Western Judeo-Christian culture. Well maybe not tired, but I'm just sick of that being the dominate view in my life. I've tried to expand out and I have in many ways but fuck I'll be glad when and if the dominate culture in my life (and on earth) is unified and contains a wider range of things than what I grew up with. I don't know whether my jadedness is something that is common or not though. At first glance it seems that most people want to just focus on their own little cultural world and that is it, but I could be wrong, it could be a matter of tradition and people just never get exposed to variety.

Not that I don't have gripes about other cultures that I have learned about. Some aspects of Confuscianism are disturbingly harmful or just plain wonky. And there are also certain ritualistic things in Japanese culture that I could do without. Though I do admire their championing of practicalness above many things. I wish I knew more about African culture. I probably do, but the white man probably stole it from the slaves and called it their own. 

Speaking of the white man or THE MAN.  I make jest of the term a lot but sometimes my grandfather or older aunts use the same term and it is not a joke to them. Because whether people want to believe them or not they had some real experiences with that they called THE MAN and as much as people like to deny it some bad shit happened.

It is so disturbing when I hear these people talk about private sector doing best for the people in some cases. Often the view of conservative leaning people. Do those people not remember the civil rights movement, when we gave state governments and private sector a chance to do right and they fucked it up.  The fact that there was debate on not renewing the voting rights act because the south "learned its lesson" and shouldn't be subject to such rules was disappointing. Sometimes I think too many people have forgotten what used to go on in this country.

But this always seems to be the swing of the pendulum as my ethics teacher described. The liberal 60's and 70's lead to the conservative backswing in the 80's and 90's. Now I think it is swinging back I guess.

Healthcare is another issues a lot of idiots seem to have an opinion on. They just like to pick a side and talk about it. I've heard one person say something even handed and intelligent about it. It was this documentary where the person said, look there is a problem neither side has a perfect solution but we need to figure out something. Most people just criticize the other side, and ignore the holes in their criticism. Like people who support private saying certain universal plans in other countries have long waiting lists (1 million plus people). But then they neglect to mention 1 million people compared 45 million people who don't have care in the private system country. Baffling. Then the universal people don't recognize that most studies show that care is diminished across the whole in a universal system, you have to admit that not tell me that universal is the answer without mentioning caveats.  Universal is the answer but no current universal system is perfect. I just want more even analysis of things. FUCK! this goes on with everything, I hardly run into anybody who can analyze something without emmotional attachment or some other reason not to give even analysis. That is not true I do know some people who can do that, but it is rare. I just don't get it sometimes.