There's a blog piece on the Zimmerman-Martin story at OneSTDV here
and there is quite a long comment thread following.
On it, certain subjects crop up that are recurring issues among those on our side. One example is the claim, often made, that 'liberals', or DWLs if you must, are people who avoid all contact with 'NAMs', and prefer living in lily-White (it's almost always worded that way) enclaves or upscale neighborhoods. Almost everyone seems to agree with that.
Is it true?
Another comment links social class and/or educational level with being indoctrinated into the media's warped picture of the world.
Is there any connection between social class or economic level and 'DWL' attitudes? I think it's pretty well established via studies and surveys that educational level is a predictor of liberal attitudes.
Liberals and leftists often crow that they (liberals) are more educated and 'smarter' than right-wingers, but anyone who has a modicum of life experience knows that education and intelligence do not always go together; as my dear Daddy used to say, there are 'educated fools'. Higher education nowadays is notoriously liberal in content and politically correct; many young people from conservative families go off to college and return fully indoctrinated into cultural Marxism and the trendy chic leftism of our day. So yes, higher education is often indoctrination into the PC orthodoxies.
For that matter, even the elementary school children get large doses of indoctrination these days, mostly around the subject of 'diversity and inclusion'. And this takes place in supposedly conservative Christian schools as well.
Someone on the OneSTDV thread mentioned how the lower or lower-middle classes are indoctrinated thanks to their heavy TV consumption. One does not need to go to college or university to become brainwashed; it's all available through your television set and in your movie theater, and much of it is aimed at the less educated classes. They imbibe it through commercials, movies, popular TV shows -- sitcoms feature 'gay' characters, interracial characters, miscegeny, the whole gamut of the ideas that are being pushed by the cultural Marxists.
I am not sure that there is a clear difference in attitudes based on social classes or educational levels. It seems that everybody is subject to the messages being propagated by our PC establishment; it is just dispensed in different formats or packaging for different people.
Ideally those with higher education would have been taught to think independently, and to evaluate things for themselves, based on an established set of standards. But such things are not taught much these days. It seems that some people for unknown reasons resist the barrage of propaganda that is directed at us all. Are such people impervious for a discernible reason?
I would like to think that a regenerate Christian would better be able to discern moral issues -- which are also political issues in many cases. But sadly, this does not seem to be the case overall. Many Christians who follow the cult of 'niceness' cannot see through the cultural Marxist propaganda, and accept it as being consonant with Christianity, which it is not. It is a cheap counterfeit, or a perversion of the teachings of Christ.
Amusingly, someone on the thread asks (and I'm paraphrasing here) whether liberals do in fact have some kind of mental disorder or perhaps even a parasite that affects their cognition. It's been said, often, that 'liberalism is a mental disorder', and at times I've half believed it. However I was once a deluded liberal and though it took me years to find my way out of that maze, I did so, and now want to see others emerge safely from it. However some people never seem to be able to see the world outside the liberal paradigm, and thus continue to nurse their liberal delusions on into old age. It seems that only a few people escape intact from it. Why?
But there is something very troubling about a belief system that so affects adherents' ability to think logically and objectively, and to discern truth from falsehood. Liberalism/leftism/progressivism, or whatever label you choose, are all edifices of lies. They are built on mistaken notions about human nature, the world, and morality. There is clearly some kind of delusion involved there. I can see it in some of the liberals/leftists that I know; they literally cannot think their way out of the maze that is liberalism.
But to return to the perennial question about why liberals like to live away from the 'diversity' they claim to celebrate. My answer is: they don't always shun it. Many of them deliberately live in 'bohemian'-type neighborhoods, often on the edge of ghettos or barrios. Many liberals/leftists enjoy this kind of 'edgy' environment. Oftentimes these people have multiracial or multicultural friends.
Many of the idealistic lefties, usually college students or younger adults, live in run-down neighborhoods by necessity, because, despite their being college-educated, they often work at low-paying jobs, and cannot afford to live in the big city unless they live in a 'diverse' urban area with lower rents. They often have to use public transit, and this, too, inevitably brings you in contact with 'diversity' in any big city. Riding public transit of whatever type is often an education in itself for those liberals who come from non-diverse small towns or rural areas. I would prescribe riding public transit in a big city (or even a mid-size one) as a way for the naïve to get a taste of reality.
Sadly, though, even exposure to the urban jungle does not convert many young liberals from their delusions; I know because I used to be such a person, and it took many years of exposure to the dangers of city life, being mugged, robbed, and harassed, and having relatives and co-workers mugged and robbed (and worse) and still I held onto my liberal beliefs. Somehow, the lights came on after many years of cumulative experience, but for some dyed-in-the-wool lefties, the light never goes on. They clutch their illusions, and refuse to give them up. They cope by clinging to their utopian beliefs and wishful thoughts.
It's easier for some on our side to insist that liberals avoid diversity and thus maintain their ideology, but it is not always true. Some have a lot of exposure to the reality, but still refuse to see obvious patterns.
Human beings are more complicated than we like to think.
And the power of all the indoctrination, in addition to peer pressure and 'groupthink', works against us.
We'd like to think that all this hype and agitprop about the Zimmerman-Martin case will jolt some people to reality, but will it?
In a 1965 movie called A Thousand Clowns, Jason Robards Jr. played a very liberal character, a perpetual adolescent, who resisted being integrated into the adult world of responsibility and 'conformism', as he saw it. I can only think of the scene in which someone speaks to him of getting back to reality, and he quickly responds: "I'll only go as a tourist!" Liberals prefer not to even visit reality as a 'tourist', much less live in it. They prefer their imaginary 'constructs' to reality.
