Liberals

[SilverTurtle]

Thanks you for articulating exactly what I was thinking.

I come from a lower-middle class family and a rural school district. Not an inner city school district or the poorest school district, just and average one. And because my parents both have worked hard, they were able to help me pay for college. But since I also paid for college (and will be for a looong time with my loans) that meant I had jobs all through school. That meant I didn't get to take some sweet internships because they didn't pay or didn't pay enough for me to pay for school and eat. Opportunities are very drastically limited when you don't have a lot of money. I've earned my college degree, and I still struggle to pay all of my bills and loans every month.

Originally posted by Betarulz!
The problem with this "logic" is that when comparing it to the real world and the point you are trying to make, you fail to take into account the difference in conditions that make poor areas poor and affluent areas rich.

I know of no liberals who are for the equality of success. There is a dire need however in terms of equality of opportunity. I know this because I can look at myself and realize that I've been given a lot of chances to succeed not because of the work I've done, but because I live in an upper middle class suburb. My HS friends parents are all lawyers, doctors, and engineers. I'd say probably a good 15% own their own successful small business, and I'm willing to bet that probably 75% of them have degrees beyond a Bachelors degree. I look at my HS and I realize that it's only been open for 10 years. I know that when I went there, each classroom had at least 1 computer and many had 3, 4, or 5. We had 3 very large computer labs. I had new textbooks in at least one class every year, and I got the chance to do all sorts of unique things. Compare this to an inner city school, or that of a small rural school district like so many of the people I've met in college and there is no comparison. They didn't have computers in every classroom, they had art and music programs cut, they had to learn using older textbooks that didn't have the most recent history or discoveries covered in them. And this is just in my experience. I look at my little brother, and he's going to a HS that opened just last August, and every student there got a free palm pilot, the 1/2 the classrooms have these white boards that are called "smart boards" that when you use special markers they will change and edit powerpoint presentations. When they read a novel in english, they don't receive the book in print, they get it beamed to their palms and they read it on that.

Knowing this, does it surprise me that I had no problem getting into college, and if I had wanted to go into debt that I could have gone practically anywhere? And all this is only a discussion of the physical, tangible assets my school had. Compare the fact that the average salary for a teacher in my former school district is in the top 5 in the state of Kansas, we also got the best teachers, the ones who had multiple job offers because of their skills.

All this adds up to show that I got opportunities that other kids didn't. I didn't have to work nearly as hard to get to college as many of the people I've met in college. Where the vast majority of the people I graduated with went to some sort of 4 year school, I talk to friends from rural nebraska where they were among only a handful of students that even left the town. They tell me stories about going home to find out that 4 more girls they graduated with are having their second kid.

I know for a fact that there many kids who worked 1000x harder than I did in HS to get good grades and do the right thing, but they didn't get the opportunity to go to college. They worked harder than I did, but simply because of where I grew up, I got the advantages, and people I grew up with who didn't work at all have gotten farther than some of those kids.

Everyone wants to think that the US is a meritocracy, where you are rewarded by the amount and quality of the work that you do, but until everyone can start out on a far more equal setting then that idealization will never, ever come true. It is that chance to become more equal, where the life that people live is truly determined by the choices they make, that Liberals are working for. Only then will youre little analogy be true to the real world in the United States.