My friend Hasdai alerted me to this interesting political quiz from a 1994 USA Today. (And I think he cribbed it from Andrew Sullivan's blog.) I thought most of the questions were rather unsophisticated, but as a proud political dork, I enjoyed taking the test nonetheless.
I'd be interested to know, not only my friends' raw score, but also the specific responses to certain questions. For record, I'm no longer the most liberal person my friends' know. I scored a 12, Hasdai was an 11, my father was 17 (and thought I'd be happy that he wasn't between 35-40) and Andrew Sullivan is a 26.
Since 1994, a lot of things have changed. This "quiz" first appeared on the eve of the Gingrich-led GOP takeover of Congress, pre-Enron, etc. catastrophes and during the 1994 Major League Baseball strike, before the dramatic reduction in urban crime was visible and before we were afraid North Korea had a nuke. It also pre-dates Fox News, protease inhibitors for combating AIDS and the current President's appointments of women and people of color to some of the highest offices in government. In case you were wondering how your answers might have shifted over the last 12 years.
And just so this post isn't entirely unrelated to youth issues, you should know I answered disagree to:
#21, "As a society, we should spend more money trying to find a cure for AIDS than for cancer and heart disease because AIDS threatens younger people."I don't we should spend money on AIDS research because it threatens younger people. Like most greedy, self-interested people, I think we should spend money on things because it threatens me!. Seriously tho, I think money for government funded disease research should generally proceed based on 1) the percentage of people in a given country suffering from such a disease, 2) the likelihood of finding a cure or at least making deadly diseases chronic instead of fatal (AIDS, Cancer, MS, etc.) and 3) the relative amount of private money being spent already.
I realize these are imperfect criteria and in some cases hard to measure (#2, especially, since how could you know until you start spending money to find out) but what I don't like about current funding for disease research is that it appears to be based on who's politically connected and how large a profile one can generate for a particular disease. Certainly there should have been more done about AIDS during the Reagan years, but the disease was associated with an undesirable pariah class (gay men, IV drug users, Haitian women, etc.) and that's wrong. But so is giving disproportionately more money to AIDS groups simply because Liz Taylor and Sharon Stone say to. What about breast cancer? We need to save the tit-tays!
3 comments:
For purely objective and utterly platonic reasons, I wholeheartedly support the saving of the tit-tays. And this has nothing to do with my desire to bounce them.
As for the objection to a system of disease research "based on who's politically connected and how large a profile one can generate for a particular disease," I'm inclined to say that them's the breaks. If issues and causes could be funded based on their inherent merit to society we wouldn't need politics. The trouble is that the merit of a cause is rarely self-evident and requires advocacy to raise awareness and build political pressure for action from those in power.
True, the initial stigma attached to AIDS victims held back funding and research. But an extraordinary campaign comprised of advocacy, media outreach, grass-roots organizing and yes, celebrity endorsements pushed the issue to the top of the national and international agenda within a few years. Don't get mad, get organized. And if you want Sharon Stone's help, try to avoid groping her tit-tays.
As I was looking up supporting links for this post, I came across some interesting poll data of the number of people who thought HIV/AIDS was the most important public health issues facing the U.S.
Needless to say, it's declined significantly since the late '80s and early 90s. Unfortunately, obesity was still of relatively low importance, considering how phat most Americans are.
I'm a 15.
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