Your insistence that I need to talk to these people before I judge them implies that wrong behavior and poor manners cease to become such if you can only find a means to rationalize them- which is a flawed argumentative premis. As I pointed out in the essay, this is part of your generation’s problem- you think everything is relative and is just a matter of a point of view. It isn’t. There is such a thing as actual right and wrong, and spinning it with words doesnt change it.

Let me give you a great example- this totally unnacceptable bullshit with the loud bass EVERYWHERE I GO! It seems like every time I pull up to a stoplight I have some unnaccountable jackass parked next to me pounding me and my vehicle with his stupid bass thumping so loud that you can hear him a city block away. I literally see this EVERY SINGLE DAY- people driving all over the city thumping away showing utter, total, and complete contempt and disrespect for the people around them and pissing all over the rights of decent people to have some peace and quiet in their homes, and to go about their lives without feeling like they have their head inside a 45 gallon drum with somebody beating on it with a 2X4. You have to listen to these assholes at every stoplight, at every carwash, in every apartment complex, and on every major thoroughfare in every neighborhood with predictable regularity.

Now, you may ask- do I understand with certainty the complex sociological reasons why these assholes came to be assholes? Well…, no. I am not all-seeing and all-knowing. But my ears seem to work fine, and I think it’s fair and reasonable to say that changes in how children are raised now and changes in the morality and manners of the culture they were raised-in have a lot to do with these people’s behavior and lack of respect. If a strong, moral, male-figure in the home had whipped the living tar out of these people the first time they had been caught doing this as a teenager, and said male-figure had explained to them the importance of respect for others, I think it’s fair to say that loud bass would be less of a problem today. Is it such a wild and off-the-wall assertion to make?

In my essay I detailed some of these societal and familial changes and pointed out the obvious connections to behavior in the current generation. A lot of these changes are objective facts, not just my own subjective opinions. Test scores, graduation rates, crime statistics, and out of wedlock births are not opinions, they are reality! Do you question that the media content to which we are exposed today- as children and as adults- on television and in the culture at-large is much more harmful and ammoral than it was 50 years ago? Or do you claim that it has no detrimental effect on the people who grow up now immersed in it? Either assertion seems unsupportable. And if you dispute neither of these assertions, then I guess my essay makes a good point about the state of the culture, then doesn’t it?

As for your point about not judging people that I clearly havent taken the time to understand better-

Have I done extensive research into how disrespectful assholes justify their behavior in their own minds? I must admit, that I have not, but I pledge to work on this if you think it will help me become more enlightened. I HAVE asked a couple of these bass thumpers what on earth they could be POSSIBLY be thinking when I can no longer just ignore it anymore at 2AM. But that line of enquiry has never really ever borne much useful information and I tend to get doors slammed in my face. I DID once ask some guy in my apartment complex who was blasting all 350 residents with his bass while we were emptying our trash together at the dumpster whether his choice to engage in this behavior resulted from a sociopathic lack of conscern for others, or whether he was simply unaware of what he was doing because he wasnt thinking. That was about as useful as asking a gorilla at the zoo his opinion on the prospects for the Large Hadron Collider next year whenthey solve the coolant problem. The “Fuck You Asshole” that I got for my trouble in conducting this research didnt really seem to justify the effort in the future.

But for YOU, I will make an effort to learn more with direct enquiries about the mental pathways that exist inside the heads of disrespectful assholes that cause them to act the way they do.

I am bombarded by somebody’s loud bass almost every single day as I wait at the corner of I-17 and Northern here in Phoenix while I wait for the long light to change. It seems like an excellent opportunity for some feild research.Tell you what- I’ll get out and knock on a few people’s black tinted windows and conduct some interviews for you and get back to you with the results.

By the way, do you have a bulletproof vest and helmet I can borrow?

And for the record, I am not struggling to “keep up with the changing culture”. I REJECT the changes for the worse in the culture it and refuse to go along with these trends. Big difference right?

Oh… and I almost forgot- some ridiculous buffoon passed me on the sidewalk the other day at the apartment complex where I work while sporting a sagging pants style. His pants were literally pulled down to his hamstrings- his underwear was ENTIRELY exposed, and he held his pants up from falling down completely by walking with his hand LITERALLY grabbing his crotch/ genetalia as he walked. His shirt was off, and not-suprisingly, he was on his way back to apt. 1052 where they smoke pot all day, and the cops are called out every other night because of the loud music and bass being played by him and his late-teen/early-twenty-something buddies. Question for you- if you feel I judge your generation unfairly, then why do the demographic correlations line up about 100% of the time on these types of residents? We NEVER have this trouble with the old folks- nor did they act that way when they were that age, and every time we have a new bunch of young residents move-in, why is it that you can almost always predict the many ways in which they will conduct themselves with disrespect for other people? Not all of them of course, but the asshole percentage per-capita by age group is totally predictable. I do have a unique opportunity at my job to observe the Greatest Generation and the Most Worthless Generation side-by-side in direct comparison, and the comparison is CLEARLY not favorable to the group you mistakenly choose to defend.

“Ty, I am now going to do some stereotyping of my own. I see you as one of two people. You are either the old guy who is struggling to keep up with the changing culture. And by default is trying to resist it. Or you are a younger kid who hates his peers and is a social outcast. You must fit into one of these categories, I see no other way”

Whether I’m right or wrong about the above paragraph is irrelevant. I have no right to throw you into categories like that. And I definitely have no right to inductively label your generation as such. This is exactly what you did in your essay. The backbone of your evidence is personal experience. You therefore have no evidence. You therefore have no argument (this is proper inductive reasoning). Do you see my point?

It’s not your place to make that choice about somebody else’s life.

Sincerely, Ty

And just who exactly are YOU to decide if a person’s life is worth living or not?

Hypothetical question…If all the tens ( hundreds? ) of millions of babies who were never given a chance to live because of legalized abortion could somehow be brought to life today and given the opportunity to say what they think of their fate and to say whether they would have liked to have had the chance to live or not, of these, how many of them do you think would thank their mothers for having spared them a life “not worth living”?

It’s pretty easy for you to throw away somebody ELSE’S life with a blithe “oh, you wouldnt have wanted that life anyways…”, but that’s because we arent talking about YOUR life right? YOUR life has value, but all of these aborted babies lives would not have been worth the bother I suppose?

Of all of the millions of unborn babies that have been terminated here in America- the wealthiest country ever to exist with the greatest opportunities of any society since the dawn of human civilization- what percent of those canceled lives would you say had no chance of anything approaching “a life worth living” if they HAD been allowed to live?-even if they had been put up for adoption as a baby as I was? How many of those lives would have been worth living Mary? Was MY life worth living in your eyes? Would it have been better if I had been terminated? Why is my life any more or less valuable than all the lives you ARE willing to cast away as “not worth living”?

When you speak of these children’s lives that might wind up being “not worth living”, you are talking about ME. What gaurantees did I have of how it would all turn out when I was abandoned out into the world? There ARE no gaurantees as to how a person is going to turn out or what value they might wind up having, or what they might do with their life. You have no idea how it may work out. Who are you to decide for them whether to live or die?

Somebody chose to give me a chance to live – a chance to roll the dice and see what comes of it. Life may not have always turned out to be a bed of roses, but I appreciate very much the chance to have been here anyways.

Who are you to take that chance from somebody else?

Lets be honest shall we? Most babies that are terminated in this country are done so for the convenience of the mother- not to mercifully spare these children the hardship of living a life “not worth living” here in America the prosperous. Let’s call a spade a spade and judge it for what it is, not what the American left chooses to couch this genocide as to assauge their guilty consciences.

It’s pretty arrogant to say you are doing somebody a favor by killing them to keep them from having a life not worth living wouldnt you say? If that is truly your conscern, then why not let the child make that decision about their own life? If they are allowed to live and they later find their life is NOT worth living, then I suppose they still have the choice of suicide right? If life really does turn out to be so terrible, nobody can force them to stick around if they dont want to.

Of all those millions of children who were denied their right to life because they were too inconvenient, I was one of the ones who escaped their fate. I slipped through the cracks somehow. I speak for those others now because they have no voice. On behalf of the silent leigons of the murdered unborn I say to you that life IS worth living. Life DOES have value.

Don’t do us any more favors please by sparing us a life not worth living…

Obviously, the fact that I was given up for adoption as a baby by a biological mother that I have never met makes me just a LITTLE BIT sensitive to the idea that some people would have terminated me instead if they had their way, ( and HAVE sucessfully terminated millions of people just like me before they had a chance to live the life I was blessed to have.)

Nancy Pelosi was just telling George Stephanopolus yesterday that the hundreds of millions of dollars she put into the 850 billion dollar “stimulus bill” for “family planning” is justified because not having those unwanted children constitutes a budgetary savings. What a statement!!! The whole thing is just an unmitigated outrage and an affront to all that is good and decent.

I don’t really want to get into semantics and arguments that most people use to frame the debate as to when a fetus becomes a baby, because it doesnt MATTER to me. Whatever it is, it will become a human life if you will just leave it alone. My life wasn’t “planned”, and I could have had my brains sucked out and had my body thrown in the trash for the sake of convenience or budgetary savings ( !!!), but somebody decided that my life has value . And they were right. I do have value, and so do the unborn for whom I speak now. And I don’t care who agrees with me or not. I’m right.

The whole abortion argument all comes down to what value you place on a human life- nothing more, nothing less. And without a common frame of reference based on a morality and a metaphysical PURPOSE for humanity beyond mere survival of the fittest darwinism, there seems to be no context or common point of reference for any relevant discussion on this matter. -Ty

Thanks for your response on the “How to Stump…” post. Sorry for posting here but I can’t deal with the # of posts there. I appreciate that you seem to defend your position with reason rather than emotion. If you’re interested in continuing the argument, please drop a line to dave at hellsquid dot com. I’m trying to catch up on all your posts right now…