Halls of the Dark Muse

ohhhh! my sympathies!!

It takes great courage and strength of character to hold the unpopular view. The tendency for people is take what has been said or written and sift it through their own 'tolerance' meter and disgorge an enlarged mutation of said material framed as negatively as possible and turned back upon you. This is soooo much easier then actually keeping quotes in context and discussing what really went on. Only by pride cometh contention--(Bible = Proverbs 13:10) My sympathies but consider the source and rise above it. With respect Rich

I thank you for your sympathieis, and well I went into this prepared for not being popular and well as you all know around here, I usually don't shy from controversy

Well DM if you presented your case in as balanced a way as you did in your blog entry then there's no grounds for an accusation of racism. If you'd said all immigrants were like 'X' then maybe, but you didn't. You were balanced, pointing out the things which may hold them back. Maybe couch it in different terms: if a US citizen moved to Japan would you expect that person to succeed if they did not speak Japanese? Would you expect that person to succeed if they were not aware of, and did not adapt to Japanese culture (so avoiding those awkward situations whereby cultural differences result in causing offence, which are not conducive to business)? What if that person hadn't respected the laws of their host nation? And so on. Good luck with your debate.

What I said in my post was pretty much just what I said here, with a few added quotes from the book thrown in, but all in all I had not worded it any differently there then I had presented here.

LOL yes acutally in my reponse to him I had said, well if for example I was going to move to Germany, then I would go with the exepectation of having to adapt myself to some of Germans culture if I intended to succeed.

I also said that U.S. Citizens cannot just break the law when they want no matter what there reasons for doing so might be, and so why should it be any different for immigrants? All countries have a proper proccedure for people coming into their country and those laws should be followed. People try to bypass doing so, are breaking the law.

sounds like a debate I did in 8th grade...
The teacher was the one who called me racist

Does not surprise me at all. Even Anza's comment.

He also degraded Bill O'Reilly, President Bush, and conservatives as a whole, all year. I bore that patiently and quietly.
Then he called upon us to debate. Eventually the two teams began comparing stances. We believed the same. Illigal immigrants are bad, legal immigrants are good. The clarity of the eyes of youth shone through. So he made pro-immigration be "all pro" and anti immigration, "all anti." So I spent hours researching, polling, gathering statistics. I had 21 pages of abbreviated research. I had stayed up until 1 in the morning every night, before I stayed up later than 10, and before coffee. I was eloquent, I was respectful...
but according to him, I was wrong. He gave me a 70%. I went to talk to him about it. He called me a racist. I said that I have borne the like of racism all year, in his intolerance of conservatives.
The moral of the story: liberals refuse to see anything any other way than their own. They preach open-mindedness, but their minds are closed most tightly of all. Just blow it off, dear. It is not worth your time.

Again does not surprise me. And they say there isn't indoctrination in school. You bet your bottom dollar there is not just bias (I coud live with natural bias) but out right indoctrination.

Unless you want to fight it, Anza gives good advice. Just blow it off. There's not much you can do. Actually it's much worse in college. Unless you want to risk a grade, it's sometimes better to just go along.

Let me tell you one personal story. This was in grad school and my professor for The Modern British Novel class was a raging feminist. Ok, I'm not really as anti-feminist as I may come across and I understand women have not always had equality and it has been unfair. So I didn't really mind her feminist comments. B ut I don't know how the issue of abortion came up, but she went on to stretch her argument and make the comment that if a one year old infant (now mark you, this is a born infant one year old, not a fetus) dies it is not a tragedy. It has not fully develolped consciousness and so it's not like a real full person has died. Now whatever your position on abortion is, I can't believe anyone could reach such a statement. It was horrendous and frankly I felt like vomiting. I looked around the class and I could see several people's faces were surprised. No one said anything. I was in my late twenties I think and I didn't challenge her. If I had been older, I think I would have spoken out and then got up and walked rght out of the class. Actually it was self defeating on her part. I was ambivilent on the abortion issue at the time. I saw it's horridness but I saw it as a necessity. Well shortly after I carried her logic in reverse and said if it is tragic for a one year old to die than what's different about an unborn child? It's a child at a stage in development. She actually pushed me fully into the pro-life side.

Well I cannot say that I would be giving any awards to Conservities for being open-minded either.

Haha, Virgil, that reminds me of a class I had. We were doing Victorian novels, and I was always getting in arguments with my teacher becasue she hated every male character in every book we read, me and the class made it into a joke and I would always give her a bad time about it. LOL. I was challenging my teachers even in highschool. I have corrected teachers before to. In a History class in highschool I was taking, we were talking about WW2 and the teacher was talking about the intermentcamps and trying to cliam the Japaneese were the only ones intered. And I was like, that is not true, Italians and Germans were also put in interment camps. My grandfather personally knows Italians that had been in internment camps. And she was like, well can you bring proof? And so I did.

Well I cannot say that I would be giving any awards to Conservities for being open-minded either.

Sure I understand. But there is a time and place for that and school should be politics free. Or at least not overtly political.