Quote Originally Posted by Ramulux
.....this issue is kind of more important than your personal political ideology.
one's ideology is more than a badge or banner that identifies you as being on one side or another. it is the determining factor in how you live your life and what you are willing to do for the society around you. what could be more important than how you live your life? a life of slavery, whether to another man or to the state, can never be preferred over a life of freedom. that difference is a matter of ideology, the same ideology you consider so unimportant.

In the end,it all comes down to how you view America. Conservatives see a country where everybody looks out for themselves and the federal government does not exist. Liberals, however, understand the lessons taught to them by people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, which is that this country cannot survive unless we look out for one another.
so; it's rather obvious that you see the nation's compassion as flowing only from the bosom of the state. your view of american compassion as only a matter of how much we give to the government for their various do-nothing social programs is the typically narrow attitude ground into us by the liberal establishment and reinforced by a media determined to ignore the charity of the individual. last year's official tally of charitable donations was over $300 billion and that is only what is reported. that is an average of over $1,000 for each man, woman and child in the country. even as our economy came crashing down around us, we managed scrape together a higher percentage of our wealth than any other country on earth to just give away and i don't think all that giving was restricted to the liberal layabouts that love to lay claim to their compassionate attitude.

conservatives see a country where the individual is responsible for the betterment of society, where government's role is to protect the rights of its citizens so that they may be better able to build a greater society. liberals see a nation of sheep that must be forced to do what is right, where the desires of the many are empowered to infringe upon the liberty of the few.