secular????????

As Lincoln noted, "God must love the common man, he made so many of them." Democrats (well anyone wanting to be a politician) must love the poor, their policies make so many of them.

Also, I would point out that when looking at the "average Joe" we here would be considered outliers since we have what may be considered a skewed, or eccentric view on life and personal responsibility.

With respect to your point on religion, johnpe, this Hope has proven to be tremendously strong. Look at the resurgence of religion in the Baltic countries and the ex-Soviet union when the communist regimes were expelled/collapsed. I would prefer a secular hope instead of - or at least in addition to - a religious one.

Jan

Well, I might agree with you there. I am in a similar situation. In my MBA the most interesting classes to me dealt with finance, stocks and bonds. So, while working I played with investing on the side, retired at 55 because I had enough to both grow my investments and support myself, and I was tired of working for cognitively impaired management. I shave when I have to. More often than not I wear old stained jeans that have holes in them. If my car or house need repairs, I usually do it myself. So I also might have some dirty grease under my finger nails too. Nowadays I just do what makes me happy. That to me would be the apex of the hierarchy.

Did you give me a point for the Present Subjective use??? Didya? Didya?

I made the same choice, of course: traded 4 years of my life to the USAF in return for training in a profession. Win-win.

Jan

Of course, johnpe, if you had been good at baseball, they would have posted your scores on a marquee! But you should never know your IQ - it might make you arrogant.

Another case of 'some things being more equal than others'. (And she was right in her observation.)

Jan

yes! . the political elites use other people's money
to take in slaves whom they care for, in exchange
for their votes. . whatta deal that is! -- j
.

Precisely. The same number of people are being treated by the ER; all the triage nurse can do is determine their sequence.

Jan, had longer reply but it was wiped!

so, if I were the mayor of a town and chose to treat
everyone like I treated my best friend, I could be
considered a stupid character! -- j
.

so, if I were the mayor of a town and chose to treat
everyone like I treated my best friend, I could be
considered a stupid character! -- j
.

Maslow's hierarchy seems to get all skewed-up, at the top --
where self-actualizing people go nuts over houses and
friends and food and clothing. . my wife and I are at
that level and wear scruffy clothes, old shoes, and
we eat freezer food with weird friends. . it's all skewed-up! -- j
.

this is probably happening because they don't have
the urgent care section which Jan is describing. . if
they did, the ER would be handling fewer "patients." -- j
.

isn't that the reason that so many are drawn to religion,
to give them hope for the future -- even if it's "only" after death?
there is an entire thread in this thought string also, Jan!

when I was in high school, the "guidance counselor,"
a doughty standoffish prune of a person, told me that
I "had potential." . she didn't dare say that I had a high
IQ score, but those words puzzled me for decades
until I took a mensa test and thought to ask for the results
from that high school. . then, Mrs. N. H's comment
made sense. . she was just looking at numbers on a page.
but it gave me hope,,, in a sense. -- j
.

your follow-up comment was also very fine;;; here it is:::
=======
I don't think you got what I was trying to communicate. I did not grow up in the barrio. I grew up in a middle-class mostly white suburb. I spent a couple of years doing volunteer work in the barrio and also lived there. It was a unique experience.

I heard gun shots occasionally. I heard someone being murdered. My life was threatened a few times, mostly by drunks. But we got along ok with the gangs. They considered us to be neutral.

Many of the people I knew there were illegal. In those days there were not so many handouts for illegals. So it was either work or starve. That led me to come to the understanding that to some extent life is a lottery. I was born to a well educated middle-class family. Therefore, it was natural for me to become well educated and reap those benefits. The illegals I knew were born into uneducated poverty. Therefore, they set their sights lower.

However, since that time my thinking has evolved to understand that no matter what your situation, you need to make the best of it and continually strive to better yourself.
=======
Thank You! -- j
.

and if I had been poorer, I would have settled for fewer
freedoms ... it's a good thing that I wanted to go into the
military (usaf, that is) and y'all taxpayers helped me in
school, so Thanks-Thanks-Thanks! . I wanted to be
free from mom and dad in the worst way! -- j

p.s. I picked up a 4-year debt to the usaf in the process.
.

And that my friend in not only a dastardly deed... it defines the problems of demonocracy...as exploited by those that can't support themselves if not for taking from you to give to their base.

How right you are, John.
Having been there, done that I know that when you're poor the appeal of being taken care of is as seductive as opium. I came very close to the seduction of my principles after having two kids whom I was crazy about but unable to give them everything I wanted to. The support of the Randian principals sustained me enough to get me past the "easy" way. It was a close one, though.

I wish I could give more than one thumbs up. You hit the nail squarely on the head. The root cause is hope, or lack thereof. The symptom is perpetual poverty.

What I can tell you is that the current system isnt working. They do have the triage nurse there. All I can tell you is that the ER wait times are very high, and for whatever reason, the ERs are insufficiently staffed to handle the volumes they receive, and have very limited equipment. If McDonalds run their restaurants like the ERs are run, we would go in, wait until we could enter an order, then wait some more until we get the food, never knowing how long it would take. When the food came, we would get a huge bill, and it probably wasnt made the way we wanted it. I really dislike going to any ER, and have learned to take care of myself as much as possible. Its very scary and not very efficient

I think that this issue is about Hope, not wealth. I have had a time in my life when my daily budget was $1.65 - for me and my big laborador-mix dog. (Food, kleenex, soap, meds - that was for 'everything'.) But I could see that, in a few months of work, things would get better - which they did.

I had Hope. Because of that, all the experience did was to bomb-proof me to being afraid of poverty. (Did you know that you can use fresh-cut walnut leaves as an environmental insecticide?)

So the message must include the sense, "You are doomed. There is nothing you can do to improve your lot."

Jan

No, term2, that is not the correct way to accomplish this goal. It may be you who collapses in a diabetic coma just outside the doors of an ER to which you do not belong. The only way to protect you and me is to endorse that all medical facilities act to stabilize critical patients of all types. Then we should openly acknowledge that ERs are being used as Urgent Care facilities and introduce a triage sortation as the solution:

When the patient comes in, a triage nurse quickly sorts the patients into ER level illness vs UC level of illness. There needs to be an immediately adjacent Urgent Care (ie attached to the anteroom of the triage section) – but it does not even need to be run by the same people as run the hospital. Shunt the less ill individuals off to the UC and keep them from filling up the ER.

This takes into account what no other system does: The fact that when you have something wrong you often do not ‘know’ how serious it is. Is that pain just gas? Too many oysters? Salmonella? Bleeding ulcer? Heart attack? Right now, we are forcing the decision to ‘go to the ER in case it is really bad’. This is a correct response to an unknown that could be life-threatening. We should validate that Darwinian perception and make it an advantage instead of a liability.

Jan

As a general concept I'm ok with Maslow, but as with all social theories, it does not fit every situation.

Sorry, clearly I did not read it carefully, I thought this was some professor's theory. I am not a big fan of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and I think it results in pseudo science

Agree.