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The Straight Story

(48,121 posts)
Sat Mar 16, 2013, 03:47 PM Mar 2013

A few things by the numbers

Catholic Priests 412,236
Bishops 5,104

43-55 million households have guns

794,300 Cops in the US

300,000 churches in America

98,817 public schools

1.5 million Home-schooled students

Number of passengers that flew on U.S. airlines 730 million
-----------------------------------------

If a small percent of those listed above do something bad/negative how does that affect your view of the other 98/99% and how much of our news cycles would be burned up if we talked about them instead of the few?

All too often, perhaps, we let the few control the many out of fear, personal prejudice, or because we only see what the few do versus the many and so our main point of contact is generally negative.

Some time way way back here I posted some positive news stories about churches from small town papers (using usnpl.com to find all the news papers by state). Such threads sank like a rock. Perhaps because that is what we expect such organizations to do.

We (myself included) spent less time celebrating the positive things groups do and focus on the negative.

Now I am not saying this is all bad. As a society we focus more effort/money on punishing those who do certain things and hardly any effort on holding up those who do as we expect (though we have awards for those who go above/beyond, etc those are far less frequent than the punishments we mete out).

We will never, have never, had perfection. Strive for it? Fine. Call out the bad when we see it? We should. But when it gets to the point that we are bombarded daily with the negative about a few in group it can begin to taint our view and create a prejudice.

Oh, and uh, not all men who hold doors open for ladies want to control them and are sexist pigs, we just like women and being nice to them more than to other guys kind of seems natural. It is not because we think women are the weaker sex, it is just we like women more and are nicer to them because of it. Women wear makeup at times more for the sake of men to see than other women, and guys - who don't generally wear makeup - do things like open doors to seem more attractive.

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A few things by the numbers (Original Post) The Straight Story Mar 2013 OP
an appeal to reason -- suggesting we might consider maggiesfarmer Mar 2013 #1

maggiesfarmer

(297 posts)
1. an appeal to reason -- suggesting we might consider
Sun Mar 17, 2013, 09:28 AM
Mar 2013

singular data points in the context of the population size!?!?!

<sarcasm>Where to you get these strange ideas?</sarcasm>

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