quote:It's no surprise to Preston and Punky Charlton that their exurban Prince William neighborhood votes Republican. They chose their four-bedroom home partly because they believed the other residents of their upscale Gainesville subdivision share their conservative views.
"You don't see people living an alternative Generation X lifestyle around here," Preston Charlton, a 42-year-old financial consultant, says of the neighborhood where he lives with his wife, a homemaker, and their three children. Compared with Washington's inner suburbs, he says, "we have more traditional values."
Nor is it a shock to Carolyn Roth and her husband Ira Chaleff, a management consultant, that their prosperous Kensington neighborhood just outside the Capital Beltway in Montgomery County votes Democratic.
"We're open-minded and thoughtful people," says Roth, a 54-year-old special education tutor and artist. She drives a Volvo station wagon with a "Peace" bumper sticker in three languages. "It's probably easier to believe what you hear in church and to believe what your leaders are telling you. But I don't understand how anyone who is thinking can support this administration."
So one side thinks you can't live some kind of GenX alternative lifestyle (whatever the hell that means) and possess traditional values, and one side thinks that anyone who disagrees with them must be taking the easy route of believing pastors and leaders without thinking.
Isn't it convenient that it relieves both sides of the need to try to understand the other.
posted
Of course. It's always easier to paint the opposition as some slogan-spouting robots who have conveniently turned their brains over to their leaders.
Actually, in my experience, both sides of any controversial debate usually have a sizeable handful of people guilty of this.
Posts: 609 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
So where's the disagreement? Dubya supporters Preston and Punky Charlton moved into their place cuz they didn't want neighbors who might cause them to think. Carolyn Roth and her husband Ira Chaleff "...don't understand how anyone who is thinking can support this administration."
posted
The revolution is coming soon, I swear. Liberals east of the Mississippi, conservatives to the west.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I have semi-traditional values in a way... I also sometimes listen to heavy metal and than opera. That sort of generalizing bothers me and I try to avoid it. It is hard... Stupid sitcoms come to mind...
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posted
I think the words "traditional values" are almost meaningless now. Not that I'm in favor of random change for change's sake. But people confuse the means to valuing something with what's being valued too often.
posted
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the couples interviewed are practically caricatures of their respective stereotypes? Preston and Punky, with their "traditional values?" Roth and Chaleff, Volvo-driving, bumper-stickered Jews who don't share a last name?
*shudder* What bothers me most about this is that I don't know whether the reporter had to make the effort to turn these people into cartoons, or whether they actually were.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Dag, I kind of disagree. I'm a strong supporter of family values and personal responsibility, which I think make up the core of the "traditional values". I think these things have a great deal of meaning. Sadly, the way I see it, this alienates from the vast majority of people who march under the "traditional values" banner, who seem to confuse hating gay people, the institution of divorce, and the pratice of abortion with supporting families and think that personal responsibility means that what happens to other people isn't their problem. I think if traditional values wasn't mostly a mask people put over "Being a CHRISTIAN (preferably a white one) and doing what you're told", I'd be actively supporting them.
edit: I guess what I'm saying is that the term "Traditional values" isn't meaningless. Instead, it's another case where something that should be representing quite a lot of good things has be put in to service as a disguise for a lot of bad things and/or things that are pretty much irrelevant to what it's actual meaning should be.
posted
Maybe the effect is pronounced abover average for me since I live in a University town, but I'm confident that you could find equally ridiculous caricatures in about 5 minutes here.
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Yeah, I think people should be given more wedgies. That's a big flaw in our society.
"All religious people are brainwashed." (wait for it) "Yeeeep!" or "We want our children to grow up without people with 'other values' around." (I'd probably go atomic for this one) *RIIIIIPPP*
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:I kind of disagree. I'm a strong supporter of family values and personal responsibility, which I think make up the core of the "traditional values". I think these things have a great deal of meaning.
I agree the concept of traditional values is meaningful. But as used today, the words are not very meaningful.
In other words, if you want to talk about family values and personal responsibility, you need to say, "family values and personal responsibility," not "traditional values."
posted
I think the term “family values” is almost as degraded, Dag. It’s become code language for so much other stuff that it’s “plain” meaning is pretty much lost. If it ever had one.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
I am concerned about the stark political divide in the U.S. It seems that so many people on either side simply make no effort to understand each other. So often I hear, "I simply can't understand how anyone could think/believe that", or words to that effect. Too many people seem not to believe that reasonable minds can actually differ. Instead, their words tell me that they believe that anyone who follows the opposite political party/philosophy must be either stupid or dishonest, because any intelligent, honest person would naturally agree with them, wouldn't they?
I have so much respect for people whose public speech shows that they actually understand opposing views and respect the people who hold them. Really, people (generally, not hatrackers specifically), to attempt to understand something you don't believe isn't tantamount to embracing it. It won't kill you, or even taint you.
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