So Liberal That I'm Conservative

My girlfriend's Dad is a funny guy. He once told her ice-skating coach that he would marry Sarah Palin if he got the chance. Every time I've seen him, he's been wearing a long-sleeve oxford shirt tucked into black slacks. Compare this to my Mom and Bob. They're part of this posse clique which they have dubbed, "the family of friends." It's a group of rich, white doctors and assorted medically-related professionals that are all equally dedicated to spreading Obama's word and bluegrass music to the underprivileged parts of the world; Sort of like the retired-hippie version of imperialism. Currently they are whale-watching on a research boat in Antarctica. No kidding.

My biological father, on the other hand, is more like my girlfriend's Dad. He grew up in Brooklyn as the son of a proud Irish immigrant. He boasts about how when he was a kid, he loved being an alter server because whenever there was a funeral (which was every other weekend) the priest would give him a few dollars to head down to the nearest bar. There was no drinking age in NYC back then. Often when my siblings and I were growing up, we would reprimand him for being so insensitive to the social injustices of the world. He would respond by calling us, "commies."

So I think I can say I've had I've had a healthy mix of both liberalism and conservatism. My view on the world in a paragraph is this:

Its really upsets me that everybody acts as if everybody doesn't know what the most crucial and easily solvable issue in the modern world is. Education has forever been, and will always be the most fundamental benefactor of human progress. It seems to me that in the developed world's climate of constant media onslaught, the average person, in whichever country they may be in, loses track of all the social, political, moral, and environmental issues that their generation must deal with at some point, or face the consequences. If the United States put more money into education, then the numbers of those problems would decrease, and the average person would be able to breathe a little easier. It also has occurred to me that my generation's habit of sedating themselves with a never-ending stream of media stimuli has developed as a method to escape from the omnipotent notion that at any minute the world will burst into WWIII. But the more we sedate ourselves with the nihilistic and hedonistic values of popular culture, the more social issues reinforce each other. If the United States put more money into education, my generation wouldn't feel so hopelessly unprepared to deal with the problems at hand. Consequently, more would get done to solve those problems, and the vicious cycle of media sedation would come to an end.

As far as overpopulation goes, it needs to stop being considered a problem. Without the instinct to reproduce, the human race would've gone extinct a long time ago. I feel that the economy works the same way. The natural incentive to have sex and reproduce is much like the incentive to work in order to gain a more comfortable lifestyle. The irony is that once people start achieving a comfortable lifestyle, then people start committing gluttony and producing mountains of trash in places like rural China and Haiti. As for the environment, we have passed the tipping point. Global warming is here.

My mom taught me this prayer a long time ago. It was this:
"Lord-
please give me the courage to change what I can
the serenity to accept what I cannot
and the wisdom to know the difference."