Month: January 2017

How to survive in Utopia.

/ rickeydobbs / Leave a comment

“Hard times make strong men,

Strong men make good times,

Good times make weak men,

Weak men make hard times.”

Our parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents fought in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. The suffered the effects of the Great Depression, or they were raised by survivors of complete economic fallout. They lived through housing booms and bubbles bursting.

They were drafted. They dodged the draft. They went to work, joined unions, got degrees on the G.I. Bill. They started companies. They got married and divorced, opinions be damned. They stayed in marriages they didn’t want to because divorce wasn’t an option for them. They lived fulfilled lives without having kids. They had children they didn’t want to because they didn’t have a choice – or at least not a physically or morally safe one. And they had as many kids as they wanted. Continue reading →

It’s the least you can do.

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You’re running late to meet a friend at the mall. You’ve got the kids in tow. You had to park farther away than ideal, and it’s starting to drizzle.

You see a person slip and fall right in front of you. Do you check to see if they were okay? Help them back up? If they can’t get back up, do you call for help to get them to a hospital?

Okay, good…that person is okay now, thanks to you. And you just set a great example for your kids: helping your fellow human is more important than just about anything else. Continue reading →

Losing at the great American lottery.

/ rickeydobbs / 4 Comments

I’m a liberal. No doubt. I absolutely believe in capitalism as the best economic system to raise the median standard of living for a lot of people. But therein lies a major reason why I’m a liberal. Capitalism raises the standard for most people. There are scores of people for who capitalism actually prevents upward mobility.

Capitalism relies on capital – both inanimate and animate – to generate revenue. Continue reading →

I Was Born This Way.

/ rickeydobbs / 5 Comments

I am very, very privileged. Not in every way, but in plenty of ways.

Privilege, in the socioeconomic sense, is the set of advantages that one gets simply by being part of a particular class.  It’s what your “dash” gets you. Privilege is the benefits we get just for being who we are. We all benefit from privilege of some sort or another.

The obvious and most talked-about lately is white privilege.

A white person doesn’t reflect upon his or her whiteness when freely shopping at a store without being followed, applying for a job, or being pulled over by the cops without being scared of becoming a statistic. Those things are just a given. The white person was born white, and those truths about how white people are treated just exist, irrespective of anything he or she does or doesn’t do. The privilege isn’t earned, it’s inherited. Continue reading →

Hey, look over there! *quietly steals all your stuff*

/ rickeydobbs / 1 Comment

I’ll be honest, I just don’t understand how in 2017, it’s not a foregone conclusion that women and men, people of all races, people of all sexual orientations…people, in general…are equal.

We’re supposed to be teleporting and buzzing around in flying cars, but we aren’t putting our amazing resources to use to make that happen. Continue reading →

Trump is patient, Trump is kind…

/ rickeydobbs / 8 Comments

This might be categorized as another Trump rant, so if you’re not into that sort of thing, read something else. Nothing to see here.

I am going to take exception with some illogical BS.

The long and short of it is this…A lot of Christian people voted for the Donald, and I’m going to call it like I see it: voting for Trump was perhaps the most un-Christian thing you could have done.
Continue reading →