debate
Thanks to my friend, Lana, I was able to attend the first fall presidential debate in Durham, NH. It was a gift from her family to me for my citizenship. (Thanks!) It was a totally awesome experience! We didn't get to meet any of the candidates like we wanted, but the food was delicious :-) And the dessert kept calling us back! Heh.. The funnest at
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There are a number of Democrats who also do not want us to simply put up and leave right on the spot. And I agree. Simply leaving would create a number of problems. That said, we are clearly doing something wrong and have not yet figured out how to fix it, and I'm relatively sure throwing troops (and lives) at the problem is likely to be the answer. Nobody with any real pull in the political arena at present has given me any hope that they have any actual solutions in mind, though at this point I'm not sure anyone could make things much worse than the current president and his lackeys.
Furthermore, social security isn't actually in that much trouble. I've read in several sources that a couple minor tweaks to it will put it back where it was intended to be. I'm not sure I support privatizing it in the way any current candidates have suggested. I'm certainly not opposed to entertaining new ideas, but nobody in a position to win the election has brought anything to the table that I think improves in any way on the current system.
I am personally very much pro choice. That said, I think abortion is a serious issue, and the only way to ensure it happens as infrequently as possible is to keep it legal, put funding into education programs, make sure when they're performed they are performed under the care of skilled doctors in approved facilities, and to make sure we fund social alternatives that will make abortion look less attractive. By that I mean putting more legislative attention into the formal institutions and social networks which support parents, families, and children, particularly in high risk categories such as economically disadvantaged single mothers and so forth. Though many pundits like to call STDs like gonorrhea and syphillus "moral" diseases, they are in truth regular diseases like any other, and as rates of public health funding increase the rates of those diseases drop correspondingly. The relationship here is quite interesting. I would like to think the same model might apply to abortion. The answer is not to abolish it in law but to provide the support and options necessary to virtually abolish it.
I'm not sure any candidate supports a view of murder any different from yours. I didn't realize that was a major election issue this year. I am, in fact, a strong proponent of prison system reform. Right now all we do is spend lots of money to make sure criminals who are put away remain criminals when the exit the system and re-enter society. Is the criminal justice system meant to punish or reform criminals? I'm not sure the current system effectively does either. I'm also still torn on death penalty issues. It seems to me some people simply do need to be removed from society, permanently, to not be a threat to it, but do we remove them in a way that is economically expeditious to society or do we spare no expense in making sure these individuals have a "fair" removal? And where do we draw that line? The whole "sexual predator" issue also confuses me. Can we really label them and track them and restrict them if they've already served the prescribed "punishment" in the system? What does research, whatever little we have, tell us about these individuals and their patterns? What other means can we use to help them and the rest of society? Seems we're, as a society, all too willing to sweep these issues under the rug and rely on knee-jerk, quick and dirty solutions instead of really looking at what's going on.
---con't next comment because I rant too much---
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