urban problems

Geez you finished the book and here I am about halfway through, and frankly I am treading water.  The CCCO is disintegrating and the more hotheaded organizations, are doing more demonstrations, they just shut down Lake Shore Drive on a march to city hall, but when they got there the mayor was gone.  It seems like they are giving up on trying to get anything from Willis and so are going to the mayor.  But the mayor put Willis in, he's not going to give them anything Willis didn't. 

I think we can agree these guys are warriors.  It seems to me that there is an odd thing about some warriors.  They don't seem that interested in whether their efforts bear any fruit.  Even if they knew in advance that their efforts would be fruitless they would do them anyway.  This is the sort of thing the stoics believed, the world is a bad place and maybe there is nothing to be done about it, but you are still okay as long as you do the right thing.  It is kind of like those early render onto Caesar Christians, and stoicism is one of the things Christianity embraced, or rather many of their early converts were stoics and they took their stoicism with them into the church.

And these guys are pretty religious.  There is a lot of praying going on.  As an atheist, I think of this as kind of showboating for the masses, but I am probably wrong, these people really believe.

Joan Baez, she was pretty strident in 1968, and even though I would agree with her politics I don't like overly political songs.  They seem kind of shallow, like all that matters is if we pass Bill 1708.  She does have a nice voice though.  Can you enjoy a song just for the music even if you don't like the music? 

She caught a lot of flack back then.  I remember Al Capp had her in Lil Abner as Joanie Phoanie.  I guess she was easy to make fun of.

I remember at one time in the sixties the thought passed through my mind that maybe these pro-war guys really believed in what they were doing, and that was an uncomfortable thought.  It didn't jibe with the prevalent thought among my people which was that these were all bad men, and I never went into the thought too deeply.  I don't think much in terms of good vs evil anymore, but I guess I did then.

And there is a certain thing where the right seems less moral than the left.  If you consider morality as an extension of altruism, where for instance a guy who treats his family well is morally better than a guy who is all for himself, and a guy who treats his family and neighbors well is better than a guy who just treats his family well, and so on until you are including the human race.  It always seems like the group a right winger wants to treat nice is smaller than the group a left winger wants to treat nice.  Well this is a theory, we could discuss it.

Interesting that when you are talking about race problems you call them urban problems.  When Walgreens used to sell cheap cds the black music was always in a bin labeled urban music, and everybody knew what that meant.  There are blacks in the country too and in the small towns.  Maybe I am being too sensitive, but as a city slicker and an urban dweller I find that there is a lot of city bashing, like the problems of the cities arise because they are cities, like there is something inherently wrong with cities and maybe we would be better off without them.  Again maybe I am being too sensitive but whereas country people are seen as maybe a little slow but with essentially good hearts, city people are seen as smart only in a cunning way, and essentially black hearted.  Well had to get that off my chest.

There is a lot of stuff in that last paragraph of yours and I'll get to that tomorrow because the hour is getting late.  Out of curiosity, how long does it take you on average to do a post on our blog.  I think my time is between an hour and an hour and a half.