Doug R.,

I also appreciate hearing your views, although they come from a different angle than mine. I know from long experience that virtually all people want to see a better world and a better society. This is as true of conservatives as it is of liberals. Conservatives have very high ideals regarding individual freedom and the taking of individual responsibility. This is good. Liberals have very high ideals regarding community responsibility toward all its members on a collective basis, and the protection of those members through cooperative efforts (taxes and governmental structures). This is also good. Without the application of both these sets of ideals in an effective synthesis, and in fairly equal measure, you cannot have a healthy society.

Everyone rushes to defend an ideal when they feel it is under attack, and this leads to some pretty strong (and critical) statements from one side or the other. We really need to compare our positive beliefs and concerns, and watch out for the tendency toward "contempt prior to investigation" which is the attitude the right and left generally have toward one another. Unfortunately, the political party system exacerbates these differences (quite deliberately) and drives people farther and farther apart, when we need to share our ideals. For this reason, I am disgusted with all the political parties, both in your country and mine, and I put little stock in what any of them have to say. They are a bunch of scoundrels, whose main desire is to maintain themselves in power...at our collective expense.

Anyway, you may feel like the odd man out here, but you have certainly stimulated a lot of interesting reactions, so it cannot be said to have been all in vain.

I will probably always be a leftist, but I comprehend the high ideals of many on the right. One's family nnd general background tend to form one's world view, and this is why it's very good to travel to where the world view is radically different. One usually finds that the people there have just as high ideals...but in their own particular way, according to their own background and experience.

The songs you listed sound a lot like what I used to hear on some Burl Ives albums that my parents had when I was a kid. I used to sing all of them back then. "The Divil and the Farmer" is a riot. "Erie Canal" is also very neat ("the cook she was a grand old gal, she had a ragged dress...we heisted her upon a pole as a signal of distress"). Very droll stuff. Do you remember one called "Hole In The Window" about a young suitor who gets attacked with a poker by his girlfriend's grandmother, while kissing said girlfriend through a hole in the window? I would love to get the lyrics to that one, as I haven't heard it in maybe 35 years now. If you've got them, please send them to my personal page. Or can I look them up somewhere on Mudcat?

Cheers,

Little Hawk