Were going to the moon again!

[Weltall]

You just do not want to understand the concept that sometimes people in disadvantaged situations need additional laws so that they can be equal. It isn't racism any more than the laws that make it illegal to fire people over their ethnicity (or many other things) is... it is trying to make everyone equal. The only way to make everyone equal is to help the people on the bottom. You do that with laws that help people on the bottom get on to a more level playing field with the people who have more. In this country, blacks as a group are far poorer than whites. That is just a fact -- a large percentage of the black community is poor and has been for a long time. And when you're poor for that long you lose hope of improvement... that's what's happened here. Some blacks can help themselves, but not most. Nowhere near. So we need to help them because leaving them in opressed in poverty like conservatives want to do is a cruel thing. Affirmative action is a great way to do that. It helps people who would otherwise have no chance of ever going to college to get there... a great way to help people who can't do it for themselves. It makes things somewhat more fair. Oh, it's still tilted towards whites, but affirmative action makes it a bit fairer.

I agree with all of that, except that by that point in life it's too late. If we are to do affirmative action, it needs to be done in schools. Not in the workplace. It needs to be done by doing SOMETHING radically different with the school system. The public system is a tremendous failure. And your only solution is to throw more money at it and hope the problem goes away.

I as a conservative do not want anyone in poverty. I think everyone should work as hard as they can to avoid poverty. I also think if you're going to get help to avoid poverty it needs to start from the very beginning, and to do that we must abandon the ruinous education policies that, thanks to liberals, have given us the worst AND the most expensive public school network in the history of the nation. And yet you want MORE MONEY. But it obviously isn't doing anything.

And if you say that it gives them advantages I'll just repeat the fact that they are poorer and cannot afford all the aids that people with more money can. Yes, black society does seem to not want to get out of it's situation when you look at rappers and stuff... but then you see that those guys get rich and get out themselves...

And why does black society not want to get out of its situation? You people and your handout policy. For decades you have given these people money and have completely destroyed their work ethic and motivation. It is the left that have created this mess.

And I've said all I can about vouchers. It'll help a couple of kids in poor schools and doom the rest in those schools to an even worse education, which is a very bad deal for society as a whole.

Worse? How can they get any worse? To quote Chevy Chase, "we're at the threshold of Hell" education-wise. And while you bemoan vouchers, you don't offer one single good alternative. It's the age-old liberal response: "throw more money at it and hope it goes away".

Oh, people say that they aren't racist, that is true, but in their hearts? Far more people than you admit are. And yes, it was government policy to opress. The result was that they were opressed and still haven't recovered. We need to improve all of them, not just the smartest or most athletic ones like vouchers would! We need to fundamentally change how we deal with 'failing schools' in a way that would give them not just more chances but would have some kind of program for success... removing money is not the way to go. You need to do something in the school to improve things. We can't just leave kids in failing schools and say by effect 'we don't care about you, because you aren't good enough to get into private schools you are stuck in poverty for life'... that is not right! It is not right to say that the rich or the lucky ones who can get rich should be able to exploit that... but that's fundamental right-wing policy...

Well, all the left has done is make things worse. They create racial rifts, promote racism and class warfare, all the while doing everything they can to keep blacks as an endandered species. What if we funded public schools as well as they could be? It wouldn't be enough, because you also oppose standardization. If public schools were PERFECTLY funded, liberals would change from "rich vs. poor" to "Intelligent vs. 'underpriveledged'". You would complain, much as you do now, that unintelligent children do not have an equal chance to succeed with standards and it's discriminatory. Obviously, since you couldn't use that terminology, you would replace "unintelligent" with "black", because liberals are fundamentally racist, but too dishonest to be forthright about it.

And as for giving blacks a chance, again, that's just trying to make things fair. There is no other way to do it, really... without those laws almost all of those jobs would go to whites and the blacks would be where people like you think they belong -- stuck forever in ghettos...

If people like me think blacks belong in ghettos, why is it that people like you do the most to ensure they stay there?