Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences 
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Not everyone responds well to medication. Worse yet, not everyone can afford medication. For many people, the only way they can afford the medication they need to function is to be classified as unable to function.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,American society is very broad, and any generalizations are going to apply rather poorly. We are much more diverse than most nations: even those nations with substantial minorities tend to have an ‘official’ culture. China, for example, has many minorities with different religions and languages and traditions, but there has always been an understood definition of what being ‘Chinese’ means. Egypt has Muslims and Christians, and as I understand it is officially secular, but Islam pretty much rules daily life. The United States is not like that. Even in colonial times, the people who founded the different colonies were as interested in separating themselves from each other as anything else. You had a Catholic colony, a Quaker colony and several colonies with different Protestant denominations. As a result, the government is officially unaligned and there is no consensus as to what the majority religion is. (Yes, most people are Christians; but while to a non-Christian that makes them all alike, to each other they are very different.) That being said, most Americans would say they are religious; it’s the diversity that makes it seem otherwise to outsiders. A religious Jew, a religious Catholic, a religious Evangelical Baptist and a religious Muslim would share many core beliefs, but their practices would be very different. Fundamentalist Protestantism does predominate in the South and Midwest, and that’s where you’re more likely to see religious beliefs affecting local public policy.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,The need to believe in something is nearly universal; there are not, to my knowledge, any societies that are completely irreligious. To put it most uncharitably, the idea that god(s) control the universe keeps us from having to deal with the idea that the universe is completely random and life totally without meaning. As for cults and fringe religions, they tend to be extremely authoritarian and restrictive, and that appeals to some people. Like being tucked into bed, the constraints are comforting. Again, I’m being very uncharitable – in the spirit of your question.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,Because there is still prejudice against gays, people who are not prejudiced feel they need to state their position – lest they be suspected of being prejudiced.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,It isn’t unusual for someone that young not to want to commit. You may or may not be really ready, but he feels he isn’t. What you should do is recognize that right now you want something that isn’t what he wants. Then you can decide to wait, break it off or whatever. Just don’t deceive yourself that he really wants commitment but is just being coy.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,In urban settings, white people traditionally hung out in the front because the back either didn’t exist or wasn’t pleasant. People would sit in front and visit with neighbors and passersby. In the suburbs, things are much more car-oriented: people get into their cars and drive away without so much as seeing, let alone visiting with, their neighbors. The front yard becomes strictly ornamental. White people are more suburbanized than others, but that’s changing. I know plenty of non-whites who would never dream of partying in the front. When I lived in a condo that was townhouse style, we all sat out front in the evenings. It was a small cluster of urban-style dwellings in a suburb. We did barbecue in back, but that’s because there was more room there. We would never have built a campfire in the front or back yard, though.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,Some young marriages work, some don’t. One advantage of marrying young is that you can grow together. I’ve been married three times: at 22, at 25 and at 37 (I don’t recommend that anyone repeat this as an experiment). During my first marriage, my wife and I were entering full adulthood together, and we formed a lot of our ideas of how things should be together. Despite the fact that we came from very different backgrounds, we generally got along fine. My second wife was several years younger than I and had never really lived as a grownup, so she more or less learned from me. By the time of my third marriage, my third wife and I had both lived as adults, with families, for many years and were quite set in our ways. We have never melded together the way I did with the first and second wife.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,In many cultures, haggling is taken for granted. Paying the marked price is considered a sucker’s game. The haggling is sometimes very straightforward, and sometimes it is an oblique part of sharing a cup of tea and conversation. I’m barely old enough to remember when haggling was done in many shops in the United States, and it is still done in some places (consumer electronics, for example, and college tuition). You’d be amazed at what does go on. For someone who takes haggling for granted, they may take your refusal to do so as a lack of respect.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,I have no answer, but I know this same issue bothered my former employer enormously. They kept trying to find out why the company was viewed as ‘unfriendly’ to African Americans. We certainly had plenty of Latinos and Indians. Most of us weren’t really programmers, but we were in the IT industry as vendors and support staff. I would say that the same applied to our customers.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,I’m not trying to excuse what happened to you; it was reprehensible. However, I don’t think it’s just Americans who are racist (or, more generally, are prejudiced against those who are not like themselves). This is a world-wide phenomenon, with rather temporary and generally small exceptions. Look at how the English and the Irish felt about each other for centuries, or the French about the Germans, the Germans about the Poles, the Albanians about each other, and everybody about the Armenians. Then there are the Japanese attitudes towards the Koreans, the Han Chinese towards the Manchurians (and vvs.), the Hutu towards the Tutsi, and on and on. That being said, the USA is the largest and most successful multi-ethnic, multi-racial society the world has ever seen. I think that, however flawed it might be, is remarkable.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,Americans have an urge to ‘fix’ things, and they have applied this with much zeal and a great deal of insensitivity to other societies. Part of this is allied with the missionary movement, which we inherited from the British: going around the world bearing the Good News about Jesus and long trousers to people who had done for centuries without either. Add to that our periodic bouts of isolationism, which means that we just as periodically burst onto the international scene and try to take charge. And, of course, we make an easy target.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,Judaism is primarily inherited, and has always been associated with a people (race) as well as a religion. Furthermore, historically non-Jews and governments have identified people with Jewish ancestry as Jewish regardless of their religion, if any.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,I think your biggest problem is your age, and the age of the boys you date. You are, after all, still a teenager. Boys your age are not known for their steady habits and settled ways, and never have been. If you date much older men, they are possibly going to be men who are not well-developed psychologically (or they’d be more interested in somewhat older women). Relax, shop around, and you’ll find somebody.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,For more than 100 years, the Democratic Party has been more welcoming to immigrants and non-Protestants. Check out the famous ‘Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion’ speech of 1884. In addition, the Republican Party has typically been conservative with respect to economic policy (although it had a socially progressive wing for many years). As such, many people associate it with the entrenched social order. Jews and Catholics were primarily immigrants fleeing religious persecution and poverty, and they arrived here with nothing and had to fight their way into the economic mainstream. People with that background would hardly be sympathetic toward maintaining the status quo.
More specifically, the Democratic Party generally supports Israel and did so during a Republican presidency whose State Department was widely known as anti-Semitic. Many Jews are not opposed to abortion; the religion has no official stance on the subject that I know of. I’ll let someone else speak for Catholics on that issue.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,Since Catholics (among others) believe that existence continues beyond death, they venerate saints and ask for their intercession with God. It isn’t that they don’t believe they are allowed to speak to God directly, they are hoping that the saint’s status will incline God favorably toward their request. Also, the saints (being human) seem more sympathetic and approachable. It’s rather like asking a politically-connected uncle to help you get a job, I suppose. At the same time, Catholics believe that certain saints take a particular interest in particular aspects of life on earth: hence you have the patron saint of this, that or the other. No doubt a lot of this is an echo of the polytheism that Christianity supplanted in the early years.
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Name : JerryS, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Jewish, Age : 52, City : New Britain, State : CT, Country : United States, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class,
