Over on Geekchik.com, the friendly proprietor of the site responded to my trackback yesterday. I feel the need to reply.

First, she suggested that making political posts may be how her readership increased. Actually, I hit her site becaue it showed up on MovableType's front page. I was poking around looking for sites to read during the 3 minutes her entry would have been visible.

Of course, she got the trackback because of the political post :-)

I thought about teasing geekchik and telling her she should make up her mind about her politics. Liberal or conservative? Make up your mind, girl! But then I realized she doesn't know me enough to recognize good-natured teasing.

Geekchik (a brief search of her site didn't give me another name to use) left room for some response to political issues, so of course, I'm forced to respond.

Political parties -- it's not about left and right. It's about divisive issues. This sort of thing is cyclical, but for the last 10 years or so, it's been the Republicans dividing the country (and that's why I'm no longer a Republican). I don't consider a desire to help people who need help "liberal", but for some reason, anyone who wants a strong social support network is given that label.

It's about divisiveness. And it's about money. Very much about money. There are segments of the population who feel, "It's my money. I worked hard all my life to be in a position to earn a good living, and I resent other people forcing me to give handouts to people who didn't work so hard."

I can certainly understand that sentiment. It used to be mine. To some extent, it still is.

But the children of poverty didn't make the situation they're in.

Children who grow up with emotional disabilities aren't to blame for their situation.

People who make mistakes (such as allowing themselves to become pregnant earlier in their life than may be fiscally responsible) aren't all lazy people looking for handouts. Sometimes they need help to get through the situation they're in, help to make sure their kids have the health care needed to grow up and be healthy, contributing members of society.

My view -- I take a long, practical stance. We have a pretty simple choice, really. We can cut back on support programs such as Head Start. We can stop trying to stimulate opportunity in the inner cities. We can cut back on school lunch programs and let the student / teacher ratio increase. We can find lots of ways to save money, resulting in big tax breaks for the wealthy and almost nothing for the rest of us.

The long term result -- those kids in low incoming neighborhoods won't have good health care (if any). They won't have good educations or good opportunities. And they'll grow up knowing it, too.

And 10 years from now, we can build more prisons. We can add more police. We can give up more of our personal rights and privacy to give law enforcement more tools to ensure our safety - which they won't be able to do, anyway. We can watch our slums grow, and we can periodically move out of our nice suburban houses to live further from the city (with correspondingly longer commutes) because we don't like what the neighborhood has become.

Or the alternative -- fund all those programs. Spend the money now. Do everything we can to give every child in America the best opportunities. That's not giving anyone a handout. That's giving them what I got growing up in middle class white America. Why did I deserve more than some poor kid who is born in the inner city today? Because my parents worked hard? Sure, but that's my parents, not me.

When we cut funding for kids because we don't like the lifestyle of the parents, who are we punishing? Not the parents.

I know people who are on or have been on welfare. Some of them are lazy drug addicts, and I'm more than willing to cut them loose. It's not a terribly Christian perspective, but choosing to be a sponge on society isn't a Christian perspective, either.

But I don't think that's the norm. I think most people on welfare WANT to get out. They WANT the skills for good jobs. But they need a hand. They need to know their kids are safe while they're working two jobs. They need to know they can take their kids to the doctor when they get sick.

And the kids need a good education to break the cycle.

I don't like spending money on this. But I'd rather spend it now, where it will do some good, then spend it later, building more prisons and creating a larger cultural divide in America.