morality of the right and left

I think I get the message of your seminal blue jeans experience.  Maybe the lesson you should have taken away is that an ideology or set of principles is only as good as the people who implement it, and if nobody implements it it is just a bunch of words on a piece of paper and doesn't mean a damn thing.  What is the purpose of having a finely crafted ideology or set of values if it will never effect the world?  Well that is the stoics way, they really don't care if the world goes to hell as long as they keep themselves blameless. 

There, I think I was trying to bring up that subject about three weeks ago, about how conservatives are stoics and liberals are utilitarians.  Or maybe it was something else.  I forget.

As I recall what they taught us was that America was the best country in the world, and had never done anything wrong.  We were on the right side of every war we fought in and our soldiers were the bravest and our flag was the most beautiful.  What was his name, Parker, Parkhill?  He taught this advanced placement history course where you could take a test afterwards and get college credit.  And that course kind of opened my eyes.  It was kind of neutral about America, just this happened and then that happened without all that rah rah America all the time.

I guess i have liberal guilt.  Whenever we drove past the ghetto, I always felt guilty about the people there living in poor conditions.  There's no reason to feel guilty if you are smarter or stronger or better looking, but if you have advantages in where you get to live and work that others don't have, well I feel guilty about that, but maybe people who have never sinned don't feel guilt either.

Slavery didn't come from Africa.  All civilizations have had slaves.  When Columbus came here he enslaved the Indians.  The Spanish enslaved all the Caribbean Indians and worked them to death and then brought the Africans to replace the dead Indians, and from there they came to the continent.  The unusual thing about American slavery was that it was limited to one race and included almost everybody in that race.  The more the slaves outnumbered the white people, the more nervous the white people became and the harsher they treated the blacks.