On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 11:49:42PM -0500, Tamara P. Duvall wrote:
>
> What I have observed - myself, my friends, my son, my friends' children
> - is this: the parents and the kids can fight - tooth and nail - on
> every issue under the sun. But ask them a question of *judgement* that
> is outside their direct interest/knowledge - something I tend to term
> "philosophy/politics" (are men or women better drivers? Are Whites,
> Asians, Latinos, or Blacks the smartest segment of the population?
> Abortion? Gay marriage? Gun control? Freedom of speech? Etc, etc)...
>
> Any and all of those issues they have never really given any thought
> to, because the immediate reality (is Amy gonna invite me to her b-day
> party, and will Bobby be there? If so, what sould I wear other than
> makeup?) is more important... Short term is where it's at when you're a
> very young human being, just beginning to think :) So, faced with "big
> issues", they're likely to spout back whatever they'd heard - either
> the latest or the most often repeated. And home is where they hear it
> :) If home, school, church and government (TV) all agree, that's
> splendid, since it requires no thinking at all, just regurgitation,
> adjusted for "hopefully, this is what you want to hear". If the're a
> discrepancy, they chose the view they've heard from the least
> objectionable parent...
I still find that unintuitive - my default response to most questions, if I
didn't think about it, was to spout the *exact opposite* of whatever was most
often repeated at home or in school... I still haven't managed to get rid of
this attitude - I find myself having problems with completely harmless things
(like a white wedding dress) just because "that's how it's traditionally
done". Reverse regurgitation doesn't require much thinking either...
But I can believe that most teenagers choose the opposite route, if they
don't have any basic world-view conflicts with their parents...
> I was thrown into adulthood prematurely, but even I was unable to -
> totally - escape this paradigm; until I was 16, I was still fine-tuning
> my Mother's point of view (discarded my father's at 12, the
> government's at 6 - at my Mother's instigation - and never thought the
> church knew what it was talking about, having gown up as an atheist)
I was raised Catholic, but decided it makes no sense in early high school,
which would indicate some thinking... Still had to go to religion classes
until I turned 18, since my parents refused to sign the papers to let me not
to. And my problems with the religion were mostly of the "abortion, gay
marriage, etc." sort, not of the "church is boring and I don't see a point"
sort.
> Bush's restrictive system may, actually, have the same "backlash"
> result in the long run that the communist goverment's did; it's so
> obviously *wrong*, people will start objecting "on principle", even if
> they don't *quite* know what they're objecting to...
That seems very possible right now...
> Of course, we did know our history (and its bizarre turns), while
> Americans don't seem to care about past lessons... :(
Their history doesn't seem to be nearly as painful, so it's probably harder
to remember.
Weronika
--
Weronika Patena
Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA
http://vole.stanford.edu/weronika
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