WE'VE GOT THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

We are all hearing about and worried about police.   Worried about them being shot.  Worried about them shooting us.  Worried about criminals taking over the country because police are sick of being treated like the bad guy.  Worried about our children being shot because they are mouthy and not particularly white.    We were all raised with the current type of policing.  We watch the cop shows with tough cops and despicable, low-brow criminals.  We also watched Serpico and Training Day.

We also can watch a video on the internet.

Below are a couple of police history sites.  There are many on the internet.  The very best thing about the internet is the availability of a multitude of references about any subject.  The worst thing is that a person that is lazy will not check enough of them to tell what kind of slant they are written from.

 http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1

 http://www.realpolice.net/articles/police-history/history-of-law-enforcement.html

Myth #1--there has always been some form of policing system.
not really true.  There has always been societal systems to hold people to the cultural norms.  Sometimes that fell to the religious leaders and followed the tenets of that particular religion.  Sometimes the government--usually a single authoritarian dictator used his military to enforce his will upon the people.

In ancient Greece, foreign slaves were often employed to police the cities . Greeks found it uncomfortable to have citizens policing their own fellow citizens. Often Greeks relied on citizens to report crimes. After reporting a crime, if an arrest was made, an informant would receive half of the fine charged to the criminal.
In Athens, criminals were tried before a jury of 200 or more citizens picked at random. Criminals were punished by fines, their right to vote taken away, exile, or death. Imprisonment was not typically used as a punishment.

In pre-USA-America, policing consisted of a night watch made of volunteers and then the city elders or leaders determined what would be done about those that were having differences about who owned what and who hurt who.  That worked for a couple of hundred years. 

 Modern policing started out in Boston (shades of copper) to help manage the poor in the large cities.  Amazingly, the rich have never been too bothered by Police or by the laws that regulate everyone else's behavior.  (Some things don't change much)

Myth #2--the purpose of police is to keep people safe.
Correction--to protect the lives and property of the rich.  Early on, there were those that acted like independent contractors, getting fees for capturing thieves and those that caused problems.  In the south, this was closely tied to managing slaves and poor whites that might be interfering with the profits of the plantation owners.  So its true--if you are white and respectable--read as at least merchant class, the police were to keep you safe.

Myth#3--someone has to enforce the law and hold people accountable.  Maybe.   Obviously we don't want to find that people are regularly being murdered, raped, trafficked, stolen from, and otherwise abused----but explain the traffic ticket quota and prison quotas and questionable activities with the designation of "no humans involved".  We need to either hold all people equally accountable and make sure our laws are humane and sane and equitable or figure out new ways to manage our society's behavior.

Myth#4--all the laws are equally valuable and none are written to give one group advantage over another.  Really, does anyone really think that is true?  First we write our laws in language that you need 4 years of law school to understand, then we aim them carefully at who we want to torture with them.  Picture life in prison for repeated very minor drug infractions, versus the hung jury over the rich man that killed his family while high, therefore not his fault.  The whole system is targeted to allow those with money a way to buy out of their legal issues while stealing the life of those that have never had access to money.

So what do we need to do differently?

Community policing is a start, but its a bass-ackwards start.

A better start is to start fixing the income inequality issues that affect most people of color, and a good number of white folks that were brought to this country as the servants and workers for the upper class and merchants. (there is a book about it now, "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America") 

The problem is not about genetics or Darwinism or fate or destiny or God's will.

It's about equal opportunity.  It's about starting life without malnutrition.  It's about starting life without lead in the water and snacking on lead paint chips and no one to interact with because parents are out working and can only afford crappy daycare, or parents are home but were already so destroyed they could not possible enrich anyone's life--not even their own.  It rapidly becomes generational.  And the first ones blamed for that child's doomed childhood is the parents--for having a child--for having sex.  Sex, a basic species imperative, just like reproduction is a basic species imperative.  And while blaming them for basically following their instincts, they go to war with both the right to obtain an abortion and the availability to obtain birth control.  And most of those doomed parents were raised by parents just like them, kids with a crappy start and never any opportunities.

It will take us several generations from the time we start eliminating poverty until we quit seeing the effects of the degradation of people that have been held down in poverty.  But the sooner we start, the faster we will see the end of stupid crimes, full prisons, massive drug abuse and dependence, and wasted lives.  Without poverty, many of the disenfranchised that have gone out and created their own mini-fiefdoms based on criminal enterprises will use those brains to create successful businesses and creative education systems and new types of entertainment. Without poverty, schools will be easier to manage, racism will be moot, trying to decide what you want to be when you grow up will only be impacted by what you like doing and what you are good at, not what you can afford and what you even know is possible.

Without poverty, life expectancy will go up--from decreasing stupid accidents and drug overdoses and stupid crimes to more people that can prevent and manage chronic illnesses before they are so severe they are deadly.

So, to fix the system--we need to figure out  how to end poverty and then--we have to figure out what we want the police to do for society.  Do we want law enforcement over the masses, or peace officers.

Until we end poverty, the police fix will not work.  We currently have the worst income inequality since the 1800s-a pretty brutal time, but at least you could go west, get free land and live in relative peace.
Once have a country with no one homeless, or starving, unable to obtain basic healthcare and an education that allows every person to reach their full potential, we need to reexamine the role of policing.  What do we expect of them?

• do we want them to keep us safe when their is an aberrant criminal outbreak
• do we want them to investigate criminal activities after-the-fact and assist with the prosecution's case?
• do we want them to provide a visual presence in our communities when we have activities with large crowds?
• do we want them to make sure traffic runs smoothly

I think the stop and frisk needs to end, as do the high speed chases that are as related to being chased as they are to speeding.  When policing hurts people unnecessarily, or even puts them at risk unnecessarily, there is no benefit.  If they can be identified and then found later when they are panicking and running, let them run, then find them when they are not pumped full of adrenaline (and the police are not pumped full of adrenaline).

And don't send robots to bomb suspects.  If they are contained, keep them contained until something changes.   Everyone sleeps sometime.

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

Fix the thing that is making people angry.

Perspective

At work, I had 2 bosses that loved to lay an E on the table and have everybody notice how it didn't look like an E from every side---perspective.
It always looked like an E to me, a backward E, a sidewise E and unside-down E--but an E.

Understanding perspective is actually more difficult than that.  Visual artists get it, everyone else not really.

Picture you are the teenage child of a family living on the moon.  Your family has been on the moon for 6 generations, they don't require oxygen, they have lighter bones, they all look alike because they have all been closely related for 6 generations.  They have no books or communication with the earth.

They live on the bright side of the moon and always see the blue/green/white planet their family came from.  It is always the same temperature, the buildings they live in are the same ones they have always lived in, they eat the same things everyday--something that grows in one of the buildings and so forth and so forth.....

They are an homogeneous group living on an always light place and they are the only form of life.

If you asked them to use their empathy to imagine life on earth, they might make up stories about the blue and the green and the white or include bits of oral history passed down from that first generation, but they will imagine those earth people to be people that look like them, that eat like them, with the same level of education and health and life expectancy. 

Their perspective is heavily influenced by what they know.  The chance of them imagining anything that they have never heard of or seen is extremely small and as likely to be wholly erroneous as it is to be at all descriptive of the people on earth, and forget the other lifeforms.

If I lost you, my apologies.
Let me explain my point.

If you try to empathize with people you know almost nothing about, you also risk that your imagination will be wholly erroneous.  If you consider them bad or evil or enemy, you are more likely to give them demonic or animalistic qualities than anthropomophize them. (something we do to pets and cartoons a lot if we care about them or they are cute).

You need to understand their, the others,  perspective.  To do that, you need to understand the filters and leanings your own perspective places on you.

Language has an impact on what we can and can't describe accurately.  When our language becomes too precise, we loose the ability to accurately describe things we are unfamiliar with.    Our language becomes part of our barrier to being  truly empathetic with people that do not speak our language just as their language shapes them.  It creates a type of perspective.

Our personal and/or cultural beliefs also impact our ability to empathize.  Taboos will never be learning moments, breaking them is an instantaneous creation of "other".  But even those things we teach to our little ones as always wrong--taboo-- become, because they are not always universal--stopping spots for our ability to empathize.

We say "terrorist", and know that they are bad people with bad intentions.  They are evil.  But the people living in those groups that are sending out those "terrorists" see themselves as heroes ridding the earth of evil.  We are their "other".

Should we empathize with terrorists???
Maybe if we recognized when we were creating terrorists with our own lack of empathy, we would not be creating terrorists.  Terrorists are always "other".
Maybe, if instead of teachers referring to those individuals that go shoot people then die as "loner", "weirdo", "scary"--if those teachers had recognized poor coping skills, something going on at home, kid being bullied for looking, acting, seeming different; started recognizing pain, and "otherness" we could prevent these events.  And not trying to dump on teachers, they have a hard job, they are underpaid and given ridiculously politicized assignments, but most kids have had teachers while most of us have not had a therapist, close counselor or priest. 

We all need to recognize when we are creating "other" with our good intentioned expections of being like "everyone else.  Whether we shove it onto our child or our students or our employees or our state or nation pushes it onto it citizens or "enemies", we need to recognize, up front, that in treating someone as "other" unless they conform; as less than, as enemy, we are preparing someone to treat us like an enemy.  We are just reaping what we sow.

The same is true with poverty and racial anger and religious and political extremism; both in our country and globally.  We, like Batman, were creating our next enemy with our short-sighted selfishness, intolerance and imperialism.

We know very well how to treat people that are different--as if they were inferior, less deserving, less capable of thinking, less likely to be a good person.  But do we know how to empathize with them?

When was the last time someone looked at you like--"o--that one doesn't belong here, not one of ours, not one of us, they need to just leave".  Imagine how hard it is to walk into a school or a job interview with dark skin or a scarf on your head or even in full emo dress or how about in drag.  They are being who they are, and in so many places where that is NOT the norm. They are stared at; people back away and leave them in a little no-mans-land. They are shunned without anyone trying to know them.

We do things to people using empathy from our own perspective, that neither understands or fits with who they are or where they are coming from.  We decide things about them, that they are poor because they are lazy and don't matter, that they are backward because they are stupid and don't matter, that they have stuff we want or want to use that they don't need or know how to use so they don't matter. 

They are "other".  We are "the people".   Its very tribal.

Perspective will change that.  But it requires learning about those other people FROM those other people.

Learning from them---not going over and teaching them to be like us--that is the epitome of rudeness, disrespect and arrogance.

Missionaries routinely make this mistake and use their own beliefs to explain why it is OK.  Then we all cry when a mission is destroyed or missionaries murdered and blame it on the savages.
Soldiers make this mistake by command.  They are given very stereotypical educations on the native peoples and are then allowed to treat them as less than human.  It makes it easier to kill them.
Police make this mistake, by local tradition.  They use no empathy and only have their police perspective.  They want and demand  their respect as representatives of the law, but do not have requirements about respecting the people they interact with.  Police have become their own tribe just like soldiers in other countries become their own tribe.  Sometimes those 2 tribes have a hard time returning to the larger tribe.  The rules are very different as civilians.

A tribe creates its own taboos and mores.
Like tribes of extremists or a loner whose entire tribe lives only in his head, their taboos are about rules very specific to their own extreme views.  Their taboos may allow the killing of innocents or the renaming of innocents so that their deaths are acceptable.  Or they may make the killing of all that are not part of their tribe acceptable.
While most religions are anti-killing, it is obviously not a taboo in very many.
Taboos, those things we tend to think of as universal, are anything but.
We know it is taboo to rape children or eat human flesh.
But the  Korowai are a tribe of about 4,000 individuals living in the jungle of New Guinea,that still practice cannibalism in ritual.
And adults having sex with children, while illegal, is common, and there are places known to be openly providing children for this to wealthy visitors.
There are taboos against eating with your left hand which seems ridiculous to most of us but pretty nausea-provoking to others.
There are taboos against reproduction with first degree relatives (incest), but that was OK and common among ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
There are places with taboos about eating beef and places with taboos about eating pork and places with taboos about eating insects.

What all this means is that we need to improve and enlarge our own perspective.  We need to go for the 360 degree world view.
We all need to go to the figurative mountaintop and examine those issues we believe are only one way, from all sides.
We need to be fact-checkers.
We need to be seekers of truth in libraries not our own.
We need to question everything we have ever taken for granted as true because we have always known it was so.
We need to become the answer to the hate and anxiety and fearfulness that surrounds us.

Understanding the need for perspective makes us all better and makes us all part of the same tribe.
And no matter how many we are, no matter how rich some are or techno some are or poor some are--we have always been just one tribe.
We are all "the people".

Loyalty

Loyalty.
I have loyal family members.
I have bosses and coworkers that see loyalty as a very valuable character trait.

I am not a fan of loyalty.
I am not loyal.
My ex- would have attested to that.  He wanted loyalty no matter what.  That was never going to be me.
I have a problem with anyone that places loyalty to a person, place, team, idea, race, religion or even country above truth, reality, righteousness and functionality.

I am currently blaming loyalty for our current presidential campaign, our policing problem, and our "asleep-at-the-wheel" problem (yep--wake up, while we can still fix our problems as a nation).

I was presented with a facebook post that told me that if I'm anti-police, unfriend them. A divisive, offensive, choose-a-side post.  No doubt about it, its goal was made by a loyal person that can not look at a problem with blinders off for fear of offending those she is loyal to.

We have people willing to vote for candidates they can't say anything good about because they are loyal to their chosen political party.

We have people that say they know that racism is wrong, but refuse to support changing how things are because their family is openly supporters of white supremist groups.

We have bad Doctors that keep practicing because their peers refuse to police themselves and predator priests because they are fellow clerics.  We hide our rapists and scammers and bigots and other violent, unethical, wrong people because they are part of our group--they are one of us, one of ours.

I once saw a movie where a parent turned in their child for a heinous crime.  That stuck with me, not because it was wrong of them, but because I know people that would never do that.  They would, in fact, try to hide the crime, protect the grown or mostly grown child even at extreme risk to other people.

They were loyal.

Loyalty is not the same as love.  It is not the same as caring.  It is not the same as forgiving.

It is mindless.

 It is based on nothing more than "us" versus "them".

We need more mindfulness and less loyalty.

I'm all for changing the connotations of the word loyalty to mean something--well--less positive.  Use it to replace ignorant or silly, perhaps unthinking.

If you must be loyal, be loyal to goodness.  Be loyal to preserving life.  Be loyal to preserving a healthy and diverse planet full of life.  Be loyal to caring about everyone equally.

Or just use your ability to put yourself in the position of other people and don't make crazy but loyal statements just to gain the approval of your group.

Love--the love of all life--is good.  Loyalty  does not provide much value toward improving all our lives.  Just an old by-product of a world where siding with a winner will keep you alive.  Very feudal.

Don't sell your soul for your own profit and protection--give it away for the good of all.

oUT OF cHAOS COMES WhAt?

There is a part of me that really, really hopes that all the insanity of the current millennium is just the normal death throes of the old and birth spasms of the new, as I repeatedly heard when I was young.

It was definitely what a lot of New Age philosophers and astrologers predicted for the first 12 to 20 years  of what was not only a new millennium but also potentially a new age--the age of Aquarius.  The 5th Dimension even bought in with a song or two.

Birth can be pretty traumatic, as can the creation of a new mountain---or star.

Death can be either horrific or  post-climatic, and unfortunately I have seen both.  Death is hard to watch without being affected.

But what really scares me is that this might be more of the same: the pendulum swinging, the usual--revolutions, civil unrest, war, philosophical debate that has hard repercussions on those at the bottom of the  food chain.

Who are we?

What are we really?

The human species  is capable of greatness....at least that is what seems to be proposed by discussions of technology, medical breakthroughs, transportation, scientific understanding...even its art, poetry, music, dance and literature seem amazing when compared to--say--a beaver dam or a wasp nest.

But is that what defines us?  Is that who most of us are?

Or are most of us much less grand, much more self-centered.

Whatever we are--we have taken over the world.  We have taken every other species habitat with little concern for why we are taking it.  We take.

Sure, male lions will kill the cubs of other male lions before keeping the lioness in their pride--and interesting that we call that group a pride, since humans have great motivation from their own pride.  But lions didn't take over the whole earth.  Perhaps if they had been less focused on their own personal genetic promulgation and more on the survival of their whole species, it would be the males with all the hair running the world .

But humans no longer kill the children of their newly claimed partners, that was a long ago and/or not generally talked about part of our human history.

We do kill though.  And not just for survival.

We kill, using the children of our worker-bees (I truly hate when someone compares the people in a company or a nation that do the actual work that, such a sign that those in power consider themselves far above the hoi polloi.  More a sign of a decaying social structure than of those at the top being better than anyone else.) and call it war or police actions or military intervention, but really meaning we had our people kill their people until the real important people screamed uncle and talked about doing what we wanted.  When we are on our own soil fighting, its understandable, but when we ship our own somewhere else, hard to play the "good guy" card unless we are fighting for the people in their  homes and were invited by them to help us.

But on our own soil--why do we ever get to fighting?  Why are we killing?
Do we fight and kill for food and water and our right to stay in our home?
Or do we fight to take someone else's home or food or water.

Or do we just want more, so are willing to kill to get more with no thought of who we are taking it from.

We had ranchers willing to kill for the right to graze their huge herds on national land, everyone's land--land I can spend the night on without permission and paying.  Perhaps they just needed to pay the people that owned the land to graze the herd and make sure that the land was not injured.  Of course, these are the same people that want to kill all the other animals, deer, antelope, buffalo, wolves, mountain sheep, coyotes, whatever lives there, to protect their  "investment".  So it really is just greed, greed and selfishness that is urging them onward in their war to keep land that is not any more theirs than mine or yours.

We have weapons manufacturers that fight rules for gun ownership--like having a gun is not at least as fraught with danger and responsibility as owning and/or driving a car.  I have had to maintain a driver's license, car tag and liability insurance since age 16, the earliest I could legally and independently own and drive a car, but if Joe-blow gives his 10 year old a gun, that is okie-dokie.  No lessons on how to use and maintain a weapon, no liability insurance, no shooters license-basically no regulation at all.  Too bad our forefathers hadn't the insight to make an amendment guaranteeing the rights of us all to drive anything, anywhere, any way we like.  I would have saved a butt-load of money--though I'm sure the number of traffic  accidents would have taken a good number of us out of the population.

Sociologists have posited theories on connections between behaviors that thin the herd--wars, gangs, increase in non-breeding individuals, decrease in attempts to provide healthcare and basic sustenance when the population is becoming too large.  That makes a kind of sense, so many of us we lose our value, but then why do we turn around and try to make it impossible to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion.  What is the benefit of making people be born only to suffer and die young or live terrible lives.

Who are we humans?

I don't really think we have only had the craziness we see since the new millennium started.  I'm pretty sure all that really changed is my perspective.

I sort of woke up and started watching what was going on.  Always easier when you are not running on a hamster wheel trying to get ahead or struggling to raise children--with all the anxiety and pressure to not screw that up.  My kids grew up about then.

We humans, we have always had a lot of chaos.  We kill.  We take.  We judge.  We are full of pride about things that don't matter.  We worry about our place in the social order and finagle ways to put our offsprings out of the harms way that is just being just another kid of a "workerbee"  We want status.  We want nicer stuff than our neighbors.

We want physical proof that we are doing well.

We humans--so insecure.

Maybe we should all spend more time making something beautiful and useful;  or just hugging each other.