the circle of altruism

I'm thinking about  the circle of altruism this morning,  Take a guy who only thinks of himself, doesn't give a damn about anybody else.  Nobody likes this guy.  Let's widen the circle a bit,  How about a guy who is nice to his family but fuck everybody else, like the mobsters who are devoted to their families.  Some people think better of them because of how nice they are to their children and all, but myself I have never seen that as much of a virtue, being as how I am not in their family.

Let's widen the circle again and here we find a guy who is nice to himself and his family and his friends and his neighbors.  Kind of like the average Joe I think, a nice guy if you are his friend or his neighbor, maybe not so much if you aren't, but then you rather expect if you met him or moved into his neighborhood , you would probably be included in his circle.  A pretty nice guy I think, but nobody special.

But what if we widen the circle further still to where now he is nice to people he doesn't even know, people in his city, his state, his country.  Most everybody likes this guy.  He's a patriot, he is a booster, he's the guy most of our politicians pretend to be and probably some of them even are.  But a few cracks are beginning to show, some people within his city, state, or country don't like others in the same area, and don't like to see them treated nicely, maybe the blacks think he shouldn't treat the whites so nicely, or the whites think he shouldn't treat the blacks so nicely, likewise the rich and the poor.

How about if we widen the circle to include everybody?  Most people are not so crazy about this guy.  They may give him lip service as a wonderful humanitarian, but most of the people in his country see him as a bit of a traitor.  If there is some conflict between his country and another country, they don't want to see him weighing which country is more in the right or in the wrong, they want him to be for his country.  Period.

Consider the early days of the unions, those black days of six or seven day weeks and twelve or more hours a day for crappy pay and if you didn't like it get your ass off the work bench, we can replace you just like that,  That's pretty downtrodden.  The workers were downtrodden together, but that togetherness was their strength.  If they all stuck together they had strength.  They struggled at great personal loss for the cause and in the end they got us the eight hour day and the five day week and pretty good pay.  The big thinkers of unionism, the proto Marxists, believed in solidarity and equality and they thought this was what the struggle was really about.

The workers however thought it was more about the eight hour day and five day week, and as for solidarity they thought of the people in the workplace who were mostly white protestants.  This was certainly true of the miners of West Virginia, that now ruby red state, less so the guys in the stockyards who worked with immigrants, and there were probably some places where blacks were included.  Not many though, mostly the blacks, and sometimes immigrants, were brought in as strikebreakers, so there's kind of a nasty race side to unionism.

And anymore there is that selfish side, where they mostly want to let only their family and neighbors into the union and fuck everybody else.  I was on jury duty a couple years ago and during lunch hour I got to talking to this union guy.  There was some big job coming up and there was a dispute about how much of the work would go to the union and he was all fired up about that, and I was all like, though I didn't say it, why should I give a fuck?  You know he was talking about something that would be an advantage for him but not necessarily anybody else, but he was talking in terms of this was a union issue, and hence it had a moral strength to it, that Norma Rae stuff, but I didn't see Electrical Workers #188 as anything more than a special interest group.

Like Beagles in his Soap Opera analogy, I have gotten off on a bit of a tangent.  I am still thinking of the election and what I meant to connect it to was how we liberals believe in equality for everybody, and we think it is a good message, looks nice on a banner that everybody should want  to march under, but a lot of people, those guys from Joe's Bait Shop, don't necessarily like the idea of equality for everybody, they want stuff for themselves and fuck everybody else.

Well that's not the whole thing. I think that whole they thing of Beagles comes into play here.  We liberals have an agenda (see above) and government is our tool to promote it and hence we are often the they who are telling people what to do, which the people being told are not so crazy about.

Maybe more on this later, right now the morning is growing late.  I did want to say one more thing, about that phrase of money being thrown at problems which is thrown around all the time.  Basically what is about is people don't want money thrown at problems they aren't interested in, but people love money being thrown at problems they are interested in.