My guess is you have all realized I am very liberal. I used to think it was how I was raised. My parents are very liberal as were my dad’s parents. However, my mother’s parents were very conservative. So how did they produce two children that were very much liberal. I always chalked it up to not wanting to be like their parents and being smarter than their parents(which isn’t fair, as my grandparents were very smart, just not liberal.) Then, I read this study Liberals brains work differently. 

Turns out, there are brain differences in the brain structure of conservatives and liberals. Liberals are able to show more compassion and are more able to be flexible when plans change. We are able to see both sides of a situation and change our minds when the information presented makes more sense. Hmm. Good to know.

This song came out when I was in highschool. The line that always stuck with me is about people waiting in line for welfare and some smart ass punk say “get a job.” Most people want to work. Some are unable to. Very few don’t work just because they don’t want to.

So, to lighten up the whole thing and to make fun of us all, I scanned some cartoons from the book “Why Dogs are Better than Republicans.”

Why they are better,  Why they are the same,  Why they are better than dems.

My parents always said they would support my brothers and me in anything we wanted to do as long as it was legal, moral, and we didn’t become republicans. We only have one black sheep in our family. He is the republican, but we love him still.

What does this have to do with community psychology? Well, it seems as though the conservative forces tend to blame the victim, tend to be more ethnocentric, and tend to want to remove help to those who need it because poor people just don’t try hard enough (the whole, “it is the problem of the individual, not the system” thing). I just don’t get that kind of thinking. If we allow poor people to remain poor, with little food, we continue to produce people who are at a huge disadvantage. According to Norman Garmezy of the University of Minnesota, minorities are most likely to have less. We also know that lack of food will cause developmental delays. These delays may be perminent…Here is a link to that information. undernutrition and brain development. Do we really want to have that in one of the richest nations in the world? I don’t. Just one hungry child is one too many. Just one sick person without health insurance is one too many. It costs us so much more to plug the holes , than does prevention. Yet, when funding is cut, as we are seeing in Arizona right now, prevention services are the first to go. Then, people get layed off, as has happened with the behavioral health agencies in the state. There are all ready too few jobs. How many of these people will now need to collect unemployment? We are not prevention oriented. Too bad for us.