Quote of the Day

Once you decide that most soldiers are upstanding, decent, intelligent people, and every soldier you’ve met nicely supports that assumption, how do you go back to thinking they are children who can’t think for themselves and are being exploited by the neocons?

Once you decide that the bigger government is, the more inefficient and greedy it becomes, how do you go back to thinking that all social problems would be fixed if we properly funded them?

Once you decide that the problem with education isn’t lack of funding — see the schools in DC — but a screwed-up union and an ossified system which disregards merit, how do you go back to “It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”?

Once you decide that affirmative action is generally not a good idea because race preferences are generally not a good idea, no matter what the context, how do you go back to supporting ethnic preference in government contracts? (Clarence Thomas is the uber-perfect example here; I railed at him for decrying affirmative action when the only reason he had gotten on the Supreme Court was to be The Black Justice. It NEVER crossed my mind that perhaps he was QUALIFIED for the job. Witness my soft bigotry.)

Once you decide that some people — NOT ALL PEOPLE, NOT MOST PEOPLE, but some very small percentage of people — are poor because they won’t work hard enough to get un-poor, how do you go back to believing that, because there are poor and hungry in our country, our nation has failed?

(Note: These aren’t strawmen. The ideas to “go back to” are ones that I believed, truly.) - Lissa in A "mindset" continued at lookingforlissa

(h/t to Tam for the pointer - and read Part 1 of Lissa's conversion story as well.)