It depends on which kind of right-winger you're talking about.  There are those whose sole motivation is personal greed, selfishness, and self-centeredness.  Then there are those, like your friends, who are crippled by fear.

The greedy ones are easy:  just show them how they can make tons of money, even if what they make it doing turns out to be good for the country.

The people who live in fear are the most difficult to deal with.  Their positions are not based on logic, although they'll deny that forever.  Likewise, their ideas are not dependent upon facts, although they'll deny that, too.

These people live with a host of fears that do not respond to reason or facts.  Their fears cannot be eased.  Even when the actions they take make life more dangerous, you cannot sway them from their knee-jerk reactions.  For them, life is a constant choice between fight or flight even in trivial matters, and they always make the wrong choice, anyway.

We'll need several generations of an improved education system that reverses the policies it has today and instead teaches students not merely rote skills and prejudicial attitudes, but how to observe, how to learn, how to think.  And that will happen only after we remove religious influences from school boards and curriculums.

It's going to take a while, but we've got to keep this problem, like all others, in perspective:  Things are a lot better now than they were a hundred years ago.  A hundred years ago, things were a lot better than they were a century before that.

In a hundred years, things will be even better.  It's just that you and I won't be around to see it.

Let's just deal with the problem one step at a time.  The first thing we can do is to kick Obama's ass for following Hoover's policies of pouring money into the banks rather than Roosevelt's policies of investing in infrastructure and jobs.  Then maybe we can pay for a better educational system.

by EveningStarNM on 07/04/2009 11:01:00 PM EST