Certainty is Comfort

The difficulty in life is that we do not know what to do-that we are unsure of our path, our goal, our selves.  We worry instead about how to pay bills, about raising children, pleasing our lovers, impressing our bosses, or the rut we find our selves in.  Everything in life is a challenge and there aren't easy, clear-cut answers.  Uncertainty is the most challenging thing to face in life and if we could feel sure of things, we would feel much better.  Certainty is safety to our minds, it is not being attacked, not being dumped into the street or by our lover.  Being certain of our health, our home, and our future allows us to enjoy all that life offers us.  Feeling lost and overwhelmed is commonplace and accepted, it's understood that we will be confused about all these things.  So how do we solve it?  We could recognise there is no way to actually solve uncertainty, that the future is uncontrollable.  That would be to admit that we are not the all-powerful, planning- and doing-beings we imagine ourselves to be.  Instead we create a system that we instill with the expectation that it has answers.  We convince ourselves that this process can solve all the problems, create certainty, and has a clear path to follow which will keep us safe.  The future is still just as uncertain and uncontrollable if we believe in hocus-pocus.  The problem lies in believing it and not acting in accord with reality.  If one gives up control of more areas of life and expects that everything will be fine just because of one's prayers, that does not solve the underlying problem.  It will just feel better, because there is no acknowledging of that undesirable uncertainty. 

Religion offers answers.  It does not necessarily offer real answers.

Legal Insanity

The legal system we refer to as one of "justice" is actually about retribution. It deals not with making things "right"; it deals only with making people pay, either in money or time. If something were broken, justice would require fixing it or replacing it.  When an item is taken, justice would say to put it back.  If someone is injured, justice demands they be taken care of and healed.  None of these remedies are as complicated or as superficial as the solutions suggested and implemented by our modern version of righting wrongs.  What good is done by building resentment and decreasing the ability to work and/or be productive? How does locking people away from family and friends effect a positive change as a result of the "crime"?  Some wrong has already been done, so how does another wrong make anything better?  There is no benefit to imprisoning citizens and it is not a solution.  At best, it could be said that the prison system, as it should be called, is a temporary fix to a larger problem.  This stop-gap measure should have been abolished years ago and not allowed to continue-and expand to grievous extent-into the 21st Century.  Locking up a small number of truly dangerous individuals for as short a period as possible is the only humane manner to address this problem.  In other, somewhat more civilised countries, it is done that way; even murderers are only kept locked away for a relatively short period.  Further, during their incarceration, they are actually rehabilitated and healed so that they will not re-offend.  The issue goes beyond "bad people" as some would say, and even beyond simple monetary poverty.  This is at heart a problem which stems from our neurotic notions of complete individual responsibility, which has expanded to such an extent that a person is deemed to be of diminished worth if they recognise they need help and ask for it.  We all acknowledge that no one actually "pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps", because even the staunchest believer in individualism drives in a car designed and built by others.  Even these rugged, die-hard foes of community will drink water drilled, purified, and piped to them by others.  No one person-and this includes all of history-does all the things needed to stay alive all on their own and lives within and contributes to a society.  It takes a small band, if not an actual village, to stay alive in the simplest sense of the word.  Some may be wondering what this has to do with law and justice.  It is only in the overpopulated, overcrowded situation that we are currently experiencing in which this could even be contemplated.  At any other time in history, we would value the lives of each individual enough that no one would ever be locked away.  In any other manner of living but this one we would acknowledge our failings as a society to those who suffer and are not given the basic necessities and opportunity to contribute to their community.  It is precisely because we have lost the idea of belonging together, of supporting each other, and of working together.  Only under these conditions could it be acceptable to make different, to "other", people who are truly just like ourselves.  It is only because we treat "them" as competition and as opponents to be beaten that we can justify this sort of behaviour.  If we were to admit that those who are in prisons, jails, detention centers, and labour camps are there solely because we could not accept responsibility for our society, things would be radically different.  We would no longer be able to shun and expel those who made mistakes.  We would have to see that they only did so because we are weak and selfish.  Overwhelmingly, crimes are monetary in nature: theft, mugging, even embezzling.  Next in line are "crimes of passion", spontaneous reactions to a perceived attack on a person's emotional well-being (most often a disrupted intimate relationship).  Addressing these things would be simple, but revolutionary, because they come from disregarding the innate value of each human.  Prisons are just another symptom of the same condition, and until it is treated all these problems will persist.  It is shameful that rather than stand up to our own failings we lock away "criminals".

Citizens United against..."Citizens United"

The title refers to the SCOTUS decision in the case "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission", which made substantial changes to recent election reforms and granted 1st Amendment protections to non-living, non-citizen entities.  As I said in a previous post (Control and Power of 20May05) the difference between an actual person and a corporation is vital...or, if you would like a quip, vitality. The very reason we have to deal with this is absurd but the effects are anything but a laughing matter.  I suggest you read up and pay attention to this and its effects; to see this happening is quite amazing, though-it is quite rare to witness such a blatant grab for power in the U.S.A.

Buying Votes, Version 4.1

To me history is fascinating.  I paid especial attention in school to the part about voting because it was a concrete example of what people will do for power.  It used to be that citizens could get paid for "voting early and often" by candidates and political parties.  There have been numerous attempts in various forms to keep certain categories of voters from participating in elections.  From exclusion to poll taxes and tests to simply standing outside polling places with baseball bats, intimidation both subtle and violent has been used. I contend that the same sort of tactics are being used in modern (within the past decade) elections. Nowadays, it's just a matter of keeping the money "in the family" and "paying" election officials, voting software companies, the media, and courts to get the desired outcome.  Am I comparing the U.S. government to the mafia?  Not entirely.  In this one way I am drawing a parallel between organised crime families and the major political parties.  Not intentionally, mind you, since I didn't even notice that similarity until just now.  Just as gangs originally formed to protect newcomers and minorities from attack, the U.S. government was formed to protect all citizens from all threats internal and external. On a side note, that's a pretty big job: "all" of the people and "all" the threats.  Can government protect citizens from themselves, their own ignorance and greed?  Gangs went bad and turned into mobs, instead of protecting community from actual threats they created extortion rackets; the U.S. government has been twisted in a similar way, it no longer looks to protect and improve the lives of citizens but merely to maintain the control it has established.  It is the intention of groups seeking power to use whatever means deemed necessary to both gain and maintain the appearance of that power/control.  Notice that I placed a couple of conditions in that last statement: "deemed" and "appearance".  It is not unavoidably necessary to use force to achieve a goal, rather it is a choice based on personal disposition.  Then, even after sacrificing honour and respectability, those who bully are not "in charge", they simply have a tenuous agreement with others that those people will do what the bully says and the bully will not hurt them overly much. What this points to is the same answer in each case: the others standing up to the bully.  This does not necessarily mean a violent clash or even dramatics, only that those people stand together and make it clear to the bully that their days of being bullied are over.  Admittedly, the difficulty in making this point is that I'm painting with a broad brush and not defining which politicians or parts of the government are being used to these ends.  It is a large topic to explore and I'm essentially introducing it here and leaving refinement and definition for later.


In closing, what I've brought up is that it is still not, "one person, one vote" but instead "one dollar, one vote".  This is an application of the golden rule of: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Going Deeper into the Heart

I felt I might need to be a bit more explicit about what the problem is with this situation and what I meant by saying, "...trying to create a new generation that is better to their liking."  The article gives an overview of the process and consequences but it comes down to money being the motivation rather than education or the needs of the students.  This large buyer in one area is determining what is going to be printed by these textbook companies in all areas.  The school board with the most buying power is setting the curriculum for most other school boards.  It's the equivalent of Wal-mart where the store tells the manufacturer what they will pay for the product instead of the manufacturer selling to the store based on how much they spent making the product.  In this case, the school board is telling the publishing companies what will be included in the textbooks regardless of what consumers or authors want or need to be included.  These are the same types of companies that use large amounts of the money they get to influence elections and lawmakers to continue allowing toxic (by differing definitions) products to be made and sold unregulated.  Companies which are willing to trammel the rights and opinions of others.  Companies which operate under the guise of "free enterprise" or even "economic Spencerism" if you will.  These companies are actually rigging the market and government regulations to their advantage, continuing to dupe the public.  I will address the "money in politics" issue soon, as it is necessary and unavoidable.

I recognize that it may be uncomfortable and/or difficult to read too many of these posts in one sitting, so please, pace yourself and do not become so enraged by these injustices that you do something reactionary.  Any real change to these problems will require conscious, thoughtful, coordinated, and sustained effort.  Join up with others who understand the situation and make yourselves heard.  Remember what Margaret Mead said!