General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm from the south. [View all]rrneck
(17,671 posts)I'm sorry you didn't know more about your dad than you did till you were forty. He sounds like quite a man.
When calls for the creation of a small community college began in my home town there was a general outrage against wasting money on an ugly institutional facility for something as unnecessary as a "college". It's creation was finally grudgingly approved when they agreed to put columns on the front of the buildings. It's reasonable to assume that not many fathers there moonlighted founding university departments or working on the Manhattan Project.
But it's true that people and the cultures they create are complicated and there are always outliers. I would never have gone back to college but for a private grant from some very wealthy people. They had two cats they adored named Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Whoda thunk it?
This has been an interesting thread. Most of my OP's sink like a stone. Of course this whole "south" thing is hot right at the moment, but for some reason the references to "social plumage" and "silver platter" really got people stirred up. I'm obviously not trained as a writer so I have a hard time figuring out how to jam a bunch of ideas into a few hundred words. The short narrative in the OP was not to claim that "my liberalism is better than yours" but to make people aware that not only can changing ideology be difficult, if you don't have to change you can take it for granted and forget to examine it critically. Now, for conservatives who embrace the "conservation" of ideas that's not a problem. But for liberals who embrace change such complacency is deadly.
Not only am I not a writer, I'm not a sociologist. But it seems that a strange turn occurs in people's attitudes toward what they believe. Somehow, ideology becomes an end rather than a means. I expect it happens to everyone to one degree or another but for some it happens a lot, and dogmatism and bigotry can be the result. And to make matters worse, there is an industry designed to treat ideology as an object, which is to say make it an end in itself in the form of a product to be acquired - or possessed. And of course, possessions can be inherited from one's cultural milieu and treated like affectations. Or social plumage.