It’s people like Norman that makes me want to cry for my own country. ;; I want to be optimistic and hopeful, and people like him make that so hard.

I have a hard time summing up what I think about suicide. I suppose if I were to try, it’d be a lot like your post and more — it’s a varying and changing aspect, and everyone thinks differently of it, and have experienced it differently.

My Uncle, my Dad’s brother, took his own life. He did it before my Papa got home, and left his note in his apartment across town. When my Papa got home, he found my Uncle on the floor — and you can imagine what else he found without my going into details. It was a flurry of motion after that, and left my Papa and Dad bereft and hurting.

When I say, “suicide is selfish”, I’m thinking of my Papa, and him finding my Uncle like that. I’m thinking of my Papa, who took on my Uncle’s debt, and had to sell my Uncle’s apartment, car and belongings (none of which was easy, of course; DAMN YOU BAD ECONOMY ) to help himself, because that’s how much debt my Uncle was in. I’m thinking of my Papa, who lost his second son.

Then I think about my Uncle, and his drug addiction. I think about how he truly felt in that moment; of not thinking to himself, “I can call my brother — he’d do anything for me”, or “if I just wait for Dad to come home, he can try and talk me down from this”. I think about how much pain he must of been feeling to make that decision, because it’s not instantaneous, and (I imagine) it takes all your strength left to decide on it.

TL;DR like I said, it’s a vast subject, but it doesn’t mean people have to be ignorant about it. Looking down on an act that people do in one of their darkest moments isn’t right, and we should be trying to understand and help people, not judge and belittle them for it.

1. On insurance – I shouldn’t have to leave the country in order to have cheap health care coverage. People shouldn’t be forced to choose between their electricity and their health or their meals and their health. The health care system in this country has been flawed for a very, very long time.
2. On wealth/hard work – I dare you to find me very many multimillionaire CEOs who actually work hard or work at all. I also dare you to find me any factory workers who are wealthy.

And thank you for basically telling me that I need to change my opinions to fit your world view. That’s such a wonderful point of view for you to have.

Thank you for this post, as I always say. It makes me all rage-y inside when someone’s all like, “IT’S OBAMA’S FAULT WE’RE IN THE RECESSION”, when we were well on our way there 10 years ago. It wasn’t one president, or a group of people. It was a combined effort on all our parts, and our unwillingness to admit that we were in trouble, and we were going to be in a financial crisis if we didn’t make changes. It’s a lot of things, and to make President Obama the scapegoat just shows what kind of country we really are.

/circles post with hearts and stars

Your ignorance about the distribution of resources is quite astonishing, since what you are comparing socialism/communism to is actually a form of fascism, aka a far-right government gone out of control. There are countries that do use forms of socialism that are not cited by people who use the arguments about how those forms of economies are evil: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc. These are countries that actually have their economies set up in a way that more appropriately represents the socialist or communist ideal, but they are ignored in favor of countries like Russia or Cuba that have very little to do with real versions of communism or socialism.

If you think that the conflict doesn’t really exist, then I feel bad for you because, whether or not you feel like admitting it, it does exist. Blaming the problems of poverty solely on teen pregnancies, single-parent households, and high school dropouts is ignorance at its finest. Blaming the poor for being poor is classist behavior that is somehow considered to be acceptable even though it is blatantly ignorant. And commenting that people who are standing up to corporations are part of subversive groups really makes me wonder just how aware you are of what goes on in the world.