It is an interesting thing today to look at the world around me. A world of machismo and self righteous auras of blamelessness that permeate our society about as thoroughly as a skunk smell infests everything in the general area when one's flattened on the highway. It bugs the living hell out of me, to say the least. But that's not really why I'm writing this now. I'm writing this because of how points of view relate to this. It gives us a very, from my point of view, false point of view on the nature of what these ideals mean and the calling I think this age is giving to us. What do they mean to us? Strength. Power.
But this is wrong, utterly. Instead it is the opposite, it is weakness, pure and simple. The strong is not the person who shrugs off others, who seems to stand unassailable by blame, who pushes their point of view across at the expense of all others, because they're not. They are not immune to blame, they are instead just dodging it. It is weakness to be unable to help shoulder the feelings of others and feel their pain, let it pierce them as powerfully as it stabbed the person who's hurting. It is weakness to close your mind to that which you should let in to broaden your understanding of the rest of our world and society. The strong is the one who stands arm and arm with another when they feel pain and pulls them back up to their feet, the strong is the one who stands with their head held high and says "i was wrong". It is the strong who puts their own ego aside to take a minute and just sit and listen to what the other side has to say. The people who do these things, who shoulder others' pains, who listen and who take blame as well are strong because these people carry many burdens. They are strong because they do it believing no more than it is the right thing to do, and they do it for relatively nothing in return but the satisfaction of having done the right thing.
Why else do I say it is weakness to be self-righteous and avoid feelings and emotion? Because doing such things are products of fear, of course. It is because those who prescribe to this are afraid to accept it, to accept the pains of others and the humiliation of blame. Afraid to accept the possibility we are in fact wrong, or in the wrong. This may perhaps make us the weakest society on the face of the earth. No wonder we're declining. Really, we're little more than a decadent, festering former power so wrapped up in ourselves we can hardly acknowledge anything outside our own minds anymore. Most of us no longer have our own principles, we adopt them from another to ease our own minds and then if it's wrong you still have someone else to blame. I am not this, and proud to be. Instead I question, everything. I question the motivations of my government in all things, as much as I question those who oppose it. But I question not out of suspicion, but out of a desire to know, to know why all sides are doing what they do. I am there for any who ask my help, and I give it gladly knowing I am a good person for it. I always leave room for the fact I may be wrong, and can do wrong, for I am human and thus fallible. I have made many mistakes, and fully admit them, and have no reason to believe I'll stop making them.
That is my message to you all. Be strong; stand with one another and share their pains. Think outside yourself and express tenderness for another human being in a way that goes beyond your own self interests. We are only as strong as we are together. Enough of this petty infighting that divides us and weakens us. Enough of this pulling into ourselves and denial of the very emotions that make us human and strong. Those who believe such things are desirable qualities are are not to be revered or respected... but pitied. Pity those who cannot or refuse to feel such things as another's emotions. Pity those who live wrapped in their own self righteousness afraid of failure and their own humanity. Read these words here and question yourself, what kind of a person am I? Am I strong, or am I afraid? From my point of view, I am strong. Who's with me, and for those who aren't, who'll join me?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
A Brief History Lesson on American Politics(from FB note 03/24/2010)
Hmmm... in these troubled times of Armageddon prophecies over something like who's entitled to health care... perhaps a history lesson is in order. Conservatism and Liberalism are far from confined to Democrats or Republicans. Let's time travel a little. Late 1850s. The Republican party was just forming from the disintegrating Whig party. Compared to today, it was considered fairly liberal, because liberal means against the status quo. Times were different then, at the time the Democratic party held most of the wealth in the country and was largely made up of wealthy southerners who considered themselves near royalty and fought hard against such values as equality and the abolition of slavery among other things. With the fall of the Confederacy and by and large the South after the Civil War, the Republican Party took power, in fact the president who took over after Lincoln's assassination, Johnson, was impeached by and large because he was a Democrat.
Fast forward a little, come to the 1920s. The country was doing amazingly, the conservatives were now the Republicans. They had basically become the old southern Democrats, they had the wealth and the power, and they liked it that way. However, deregulation and a lack of a check and balance on economic policies as well as a world economy ravaged by the horrors of the Great War (World War I to most) lead to a Great Depression here in the US. It was liberalism, with great amounts of socialism that got us out of the Depression. We put men to work for the government with things like the Civilian Conservation Corps, and while many argue that it was World War II that brought us out of the Depression, what was that when you really think of it but more socialism? The government sent men to fight for the country and paid them to do so, the government put factories to work building millions of aircraft, tanks, billions of bullets and firearms, medical equipment, everything. That is what got us out of the Great Depression, the government putting the country back to work.
Then after the Second World War, things changed. The world had again been ravaged by war, but now we had a great business model and a full level of infrastructure the world completely lacked. And the men running our businesses had all learned organizational skills from the military, which meant our men were dedicated, knew how to follow a good rank and file system and the men at the top knew how to take credit for their businesses failings, as generals do when assaults or defenses fail (Something distinctly lacking in our modern business strategy of punish workers by firing them when businesses go down and rewarding the people in charge with more money isn't it?). And on top of that women were going to work more and more, meaning higher levels of income for the average American family which we could actually afford because we had all the world's wealth in a nutshell.
Which brings us to today. Contrary to popular opinion among modern conservatives, there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. At the time, we had it all. However, as deregulation spread through the American business model, things began to change. The CEOs began to completely take over, and trickle down economics was introduced by someone I don't need to mention. This placed more and more power in the hands of a very few, but again, because we had all the world's wealth still this wasn't such a bad thing for the country on the whole. However, we had put billions of dollars into Europe and Japan after the Second World War, and Japan in particular grasped good business ethics, very similar to the post WWII American system. The rest of the world has been catching back up with us, and as more money goes to the Middle-East for oil and to China and Japan and Europe, that leaves a lot less of the finite amounts of wealth for us here in America, and such a system becomes far less practical. Now we have another "war" going on, and the stock market took another hit as deregulation rode in again and destabilized the economy once more.
However, there is serious problems this time that make it much more difficult for us to effectively counter the economic troubles like we had with World War II. Whereas with World War II we could send millions to work in factories and overseas to fight a just war, we now certainly cannot, because our industrial infrastructure is completely in shambles. We do not produce our own goods here, we produce them overseas. Even in our military we produce specialized high cost and high technology equipment that require very specialized labor. Very different from World War II where we could put people to work riveting together giant B-29s and Sherman tanks and aircraft carriers. The military industrial complex (which by the way was spoken against openly by Eisenhower, a republican) has really damaged our ability to do this. So we're spending millions on products that have no real practical application to the actual needs of our modern military. In World War II we did not win because we had the best equipment, we won because he had enough of what was good enough. We don't have that now, we have too little of what's more or less useless. So here we are, a massive deficit that was put there by the last administration, not this one (do some fact checking, between 1998 and 2002 we had a surplus) a military situation that increases our deficit and continues to do so instead of pulling us out of it, and no real means of putting Americans back to work by either side.
As well there's no effort to lower the gas prices that have horribly exacerbated the problem. Our economy was essentially built upon our very low gas prices. People could afford to drive 40 miles to work every day, people could afford to take vacations and buy expensive things and afford big, safe vehicles for the family. But, now the price of gas goes up, Americans have to spend more money to get to work without being paid more to compensate. Businesses have to spend more to pay for their utilities, as well as to get their products and services to where they're needed, and since as we've discussed modern American management isn't going to take the cut so again it's the middle/lower class who suffers. Instead of easily being able to pay off their debts and continue to spend, people take cuts in what they buy and in taking trips, killing our nationwide tourism trade and making harder times on more businesses. It doesn't take a genius to see the correlations.
So, we need something to go against this status quo to finally push us out of this problem. Sorry, the "conservatives" really aren't putting anything forth but the same things that put us into the problem in the first place. They aren't giving any of their alluded to better plans to fix health-care so we no longer have millions going into massive debt or dying because of its massive costs. If they want to save America, put Americans back to work. Take pay cuts and stop firing us. Come up with good business practices that bring the money back into the country. Stop funding projects that have no practical application when we could be producing massive amounts of what our soldiers actually need. Bring the gas prices back down so that people can afford to go to work and buy products that put other Americans to work as well. Tell people again to listen to the Statue of Liberty and say "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" That is what history is telling us to do, I think it's time we do it.
Fast forward a little, come to the 1920s. The country was doing amazingly, the conservatives were now the Republicans. They had basically become the old southern Democrats, they had the wealth and the power, and they liked it that way. However, deregulation and a lack of a check and balance on economic policies as well as a world economy ravaged by the horrors of the Great War (World War I to most) lead to a Great Depression here in the US. It was liberalism, with great amounts of socialism that got us out of the Depression. We put men to work for the government with things like the Civilian Conservation Corps, and while many argue that it was World War II that brought us out of the Depression, what was that when you really think of it but more socialism? The government sent men to fight for the country and paid them to do so, the government put factories to work building millions of aircraft, tanks, billions of bullets and firearms, medical equipment, everything. That is what got us out of the Great Depression, the government putting the country back to work.
Then after the Second World War, things changed. The world had again been ravaged by war, but now we had a great business model and a full level of infrastructure the world completely lacked. And the men running our businesses had all learned organizational skills from the military, which meant our men were dedicated, knew how to follow a good rank and file system and the men at the top knew how to take credit for their businesses failings, as generals do when assaults or defenses fail (Something distinctly lacking in our modern business strategy of punish workers by firing them when businesses go down and rewarding the people in charge with more money isn't it?). And on top of that women were going to work more and more, meaning higher levels of income for the average American family which we could actually afford because we had all the world's wealth in a nutshell.
Which brings us to today. Contrary to popular opinion among modern conservatives, there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. At the time, we had it all. However, as deregulation spread through the American business model, things began to change. The CEOs began to completely take over, and trickle down economics was introduced by someone I don't need to mention. This placed more and more power in the hands of a very few, but again, because we had all the world's wealth still this wasn't such a bad thing for the country on the whole. However, we had put billions of dollars into Europe and Japan after the Second World War, and Japan in particular grasped good business ethics, very similar to the post WWII American system. The rest of the world has been catching back up with us, and as more money goes to the Middle-East for oil and to China and Japan and Europe, that leaves a lot less of the finite amounts of wealth for us here in America, and such a system becomes far less practical. Now we have another "war" going on, and the stock market took another hit as deregulation rode in again and destabilized the economy once more.
However, there is serious problems this time that make it much more difficult for us to effectively counter the economic troubles like we had with World War II. Whereas with World War II we could send millions to work in factories and overseas to fight a just war, we now certainly cannot, because our industrial infrastructure is completely in shambles. We do not produce our own goods here, we produce them overseas. Even in our military we produce specialized high cost and high technology equipment that require very specialized labor. Very different from World War II where we could put people to work riveting together giant B-29s and Sherman tanks and aircraft carriers. The military industrial complex (which by the way was spoken against openly by Eisenhower, a republican) has really damaged our ability to do this. So we're spending millions on products that have no real practical application to the actual needs of our modern military. In World War II we did not win because we had the best equipment, we won because he had enough of what was good enough. We don't have that now, we have too little of what's more or less useless. So here we are, a massive deficit that was put there by the last administration, not this one (do some fact checking, between 1998 and 2002 we had a surplus) a military situation that increases our deficit and continues to do so instead of pulling us out of it, and no real means of putting Americans back to work by either side.
As well there's no effort to lower the gas prices that have horribly exacerbated the problem. Our economy was essentially built upon our very low gas prices. People could afford to drive 40 miles to work every day, people could afford to take vacations and buy expensive things and afford big, safe vehicles for the family. But, now the price of gas goes up, Americans have to spend more money to get to work without being paid more to compensate. Businesses have to spend more to pay for their utilities, as well as to get their products and services to where they're needed, and since as we've discussed modern American management isn't going to take the cut so again it's the middle/lower class who suffers. Instead of easily being able to pay off their debts and continue to spend, people take cuts in what they buy and in taking trips, killing our nationwide tourism trade and making harder times on more businesses. It doesn't take a genius to see the correlations.
So, we need something to go against this status quo to finally push us out of this problem. Sorry, the "conservatives" really aren't putting anything forth but the same things that put us into the problem in the first place. They aren't giving any of their alluded to better plans to fix health-care so we no longer have millions going into massive debt or dying because of its massive costs. If they want to save America, put Americans back to work. Take pay cuts and stop firing us. Come up with good business practices that bring the money back into the country. Stop funding projects that have no practical application when we could be producing massive amounts of what our soldiers actually need. Bring the gas prices back down so that people can afford to go to work and buy products that put other Americans to work as well. Tell people again to listen to the Statue of Liberty and say "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" That is what history is telling us to do, I think it's time we do it.
A Sign of Humanity (from FB note 01/26/2010)
Sometimes the most rewarding undertakings we as mere creatures can pursue are the ones with no clear outcome and we have but a glimmer of hope for victory. And we know deep in our hearts that we have naught but to fail. But the glory and the pride and the worth comes in the struggle itself, and to push to achieve the impossible which other mortal beings would quail and falter at, and to keep pushing on until at last you can not take another step and fall knowing you did your utmost for what you knew was right and just and good. That is perhaps the one true sign of real humanity. Because the true human does not do so for eternal salvation or rewards material or any other form of personal gain, but because we know at the deepest levels that it is the right thing to do.
First post
Well here we are, I've finally sucked it up and joined the blogging world for all to see outside the miniscule yet vast realm of FB. Here I plan on laying down all my notes I write since really just calling them "notes" to me diminishes the thought and effort I put into them. I'll start off here with my note "A Sign of Humanity" in which I impart my wisdom on what it means to be human.
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