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.

influence

All my life, I've heard about "power and influence".
It was a phrase and almost a single word.

People with "power and influence" were important people.  They lived in big houses and were on the fronts of magazines like "LIFE" and "Times" or today, "Forbes" or "Wall Street Journal".  Their names were known in regular households and spoken by local newscasters.

Every town had their own people of "power and influence" and every local knew what neighborhoods they were most likely to live in.

Parents wanted their children to grow up to have "power and influence" although most parents were either more realistic or not feeling so lucky that they skipped encouraging them to also make some regular people plans with their lives.

The point is not that we have always had people with power and influence, but that we all have power, personal power, and we all influence others every day.  Maybe even every minute of everyday.

Ask yourself, "who is the most important person in my life"?

That person has definitely had influence in your life.

But you don't have to be anyone's "most important person" to have influence.

We are all constantly influenced, for the good, for the bad, its all influence.  We make choices based on influences.

Common influences are churches, spiritual leaders, school teachers, parents, grandparents, scout leaders, librarians, nurses and doctors, the landscaper, the tree trimmer, the bowling alley attendant that helps you learn to bowl.  There are coaches and bosses, mentors and preceptors, best friends and old coworkers that all have there moments of influence.  There are also incidental influencers, from eavesdropped conversations or from chance interactions--like the bench at the park or on the bus or in the checkout line.

So you don't have to be a winning politician to influence the creation of a better world.  You don't need to have millions of dollars to help make a positive change.  You don't even need a huge audience or an advanced and impressive education.  Every one of us, everyday is influencing the people we interact with.
Sometimes we influence people without any awareness of it happening, like when we help someone solve a problem or share a personal story that ends up later helping them untangle their own problems.
Sometimes we influence people by stopping to aid someone in distress--not necessarily disaster-level distress but maybe a flat tire or out of gas or even a dollar short in the checkout line.
Sometimes we influence people by not people-pleasing.  That sounds the opposite of a positive influence, but if you have ever worked with a person that is always consistent and always honest, it is so much more impressive than the person that brags up everyone and volunteers to do things they don't have the time for or the ability to do. People-pleasers usually influence us by teaching us what NOT to do.

None of us were raised by Saints or perfect people.  Seeing someone do something differently than we were raised to believe it had to be done is both educational and very freeing.  Those people that show us that, are very influential.  (like vegetarians, if you had said that was possible when I was a child, I would have looked at you askance--a meal was not a meal without meat, our home ec teacher would have started talking about protein malnutrition, my cattle rancher relatives would have had them committed or arrested or hogtied)

Think about the important things in your lives, about the people that influenced your life.  Consider who hears you and sees you, not just listens to you.  Name a few names of those people with "power and influence" and ask yourself, which of those people can disappear from my life and leave the smallest ripples.

Don't stand in awe of the people with "power and influence".
Thank some of those people that actually had a positive influence in you life.

AND

Use your influence, your personal influence in the lives of the people surrounding you, to make a positive change in the world.  Do it big or do is small but never think you have no effect so be wise.

That is real power and influence.

What we have all known since we were young.

This is going to ramble.  Childhood knowledge is rambling knowledge.  But kids are collectors--of rocks and broken things and wisdoms they hear repeatedly until they assimilate them as absolute truth.

If there is one thing that will always get a conversation going, it is letting people reminisce.

It is not just old grizzled grandparents that enjoy that, although, given enough time, we do collect more material than your average 5 year old.  But listening to children and psych patients and addicts and strangers at bus stops,  I have decided we all have a few memories that allow us to hop from subject to subject using only our past experiences

The one thing I have noticed is that the absolute truths of my memories, fear of nuclear war, alerting when a plane seems to be coming in low, opening the windows on the east side of the house when the sky turns that weird green, what will happen to you if you use a Ouija board, why you can't let eel get cold after its cooked (it becomes raw again!) covering your ears when it is windy (those nylon head scarves were not just a fashion statement, not letting your feet get cold in the winter, not eating fish and dairy together, why mayonnaise will kill you, why crisco shortening is better for you than cow butter.  (there really are a million of them)  All those long held truths will make a person under 30 laugh like a fool.

Of course I remember my father worrying about pregnant women eating strawberries, but he understood the reasoning behind eating clay.  And my mother convinced that communism, the same communism that was tried by John Smith in Virginia (Pocahanta's John, duh) was the same as the communism of the USSR and of the Peoples Republic of China and of North Korea  and of North Vietnam and of Cuba.  And it was evil, because if everyone worked and ate, the lazy people made out like bandits and the people that didn't like that were silenced-permanently.  (apparently internal consistency was not required in childhood absolute truths)

I know from my childhood that drug fiends raped and killed people while on marijuana or heroin, but that prescriptions drugs were safe and good for you.  I knew that antibiotics were always a good idea and would stop any disease and could never hurt you.  (I hated doctors because every time I saw one I got a penicillin shot in the butt--colds, allergies, whatever, just in case.  I ran from more than a few offices in undergarments)

I knew the United State was the only country in the world that never did anything wrong.  Our soldiers were all heroes, our wars always justified and aimed at saving the world.

Yes, I was born before Vietnam and before the civil rights movement and before a lot of things.  My childhood was plain vanilla, no diversity allowed, we were all white (with a cherokee princess as a great great grandma), we were all protestant, and we were all middle class, (although most of us were exaggerating on that) and we mostly came from farm folks--that was true, true-true, but most people lived off the land at one time.

We knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong, and we knew our future roles in the world.

My childhood memories share little with those born in the 70's, and even less with those that came of age after 2000.  But we all have absolute truths, and many times those are flavored by things and times we are so immersed in that we don't know they are skewed.  They are all wearing colored glasses or listening to birds with hard rock playing in one ear.  There is no absolute reality.  We know what we know and that impacts everything we learn.

It is a little like being brainwashed, a little like being raised on propaganda, and a lot like being a human.  We all are subject to it, just based on how our young brains work, how parents want to protect their children, and how parents were also once children just like us.

Changing away from teaching our kids and grandkids unreal truisms is like changing the educations system.  The teachers in the system were once students in the system and most of those liked it enough to want to stay in it forever and don't want it to change what they liked or loved or remember fondly.  Just letting go of chalkboards, workbooks and rows of desks with the teacher standing at the front "teaching" has been a long and slow process.  The "It worked for me so it will work for them" mentality makes people hold on: parents, grandparents, teachers despite all the research showing how few students learn that way, all the poor results, all the failures to keep up with other nations can hardly dent that absolute truth of childhood memory.  Poor students don't expect their children to like school or succeed, good students don't understand why anything changed, even though they themselves peaked out in high school or college.

But while we all know what is true in our youth, even though our truths are not identical, we can all examine those truths.  It's not as easy as it seems, it takes self-awareness and fact-checking and not just accepting that if it was good enough for me its good enough for them, if it was ok then, its ok now.  We must care enough about truth, fairness, whatever it is that makes most of us want to know--not just believe--that the world really is fair.

We can learn to laugh at the ridiculous stuff.  Learn to be less black and white.  Learn to be more tolerant of those whose truths are not like our own.  And be more patient with those that are stuck.
But only after we get that our responsibility in the whole thing is figuring out that what we have known since we were kids--what we have always heard and always known--may have nothing to do with any objective reality.

Enjoy your memories, I know mine give me great joy--laughter, happiness, bittersweetness.  But don't get stuck in the world you knew absolutely--when you were a child.

The world has always been more diverse and complicated than that.

Memorial Day

While I realize that nationally, Memorial Day is all about war and heroes and sacrifice, in my own memory, it is about family--family and flowers.

Today, my son and I are going to do our own version of those long ago trips to the family cemeteries, withou the trunk full of fresh cut flowers from the gardens of Grandma and my aunts and uncles and parents.  We tried to go yearly though after 18 it turned into once every 5 years or so.  We never went to my fathers, too far away and if we stayed home, we just went to the lake.

My parents weren't from around here.

From those memorial day trips, I heard all kinds of family stories.  About my uncle collecting a mouse from between graves and slipping it in his pocket.  My grandmother laughed, but was obviously a bit horrified.  Farm people--animals don't live in the house if you are civilized, there were barn cats to eat mice and farm dogs to watch the yard but mice--just nasty.

I heard about relatives long gone that my grandmother remembered like they just left. (I'm starting to get that, time does strange things in the mind, telescoping, shrinking, like seeing 2 times at once sometimes.)  I heard about who was in which war, and who died young and who died very old.  She even told us about the little marker in the family plot that said "baby",; a family traveling through that lost a child while staying nearby.  There were details back then.  Just a little sadness now for the family that lost a baby and then moved on to where they were going.

Back then, the roses and peonies were in bloom on this day.  And while there are still a few straggling roses and the roses will repeat quite a few times this summer, the peonies have been gone a while and the lilies are starting.   The spring started very early this year.

We used to go to multiple cemeteries on this weekend, because while they were my one family, they were not related 150 years ago when they started getting to that area. The cemeteries were small or large, well tended or a little seedy and showed no signs of corporate control.  They had large trees or no trees, marble and granite or concrete and limestone, and in many of them, the graves had a rose or some other flowering plant that came back year after year.

So today, we are going to my parents grave.  It is in a cemetery that was new when they bought there.  A package deal they purchased after some death in the family without telling us kiddies what was going on.  A deal that started with a cold call by a marketer of death.  The cemetery is a long way from their home, but we moved to a city that was sprawling.  It was a cemetery with a plan, a marketing plan, a maintenance plan, and its own flower shop.  It is death done by big business.  there are no weeping angels or little marble children holding hands.

I hate that cemetery.  It is a cemetery that no one wants to go to, no one wants to wander in or pray in or sit and be alone for a while.

It is a cemetery that never quite meets the promises they sold my parents.

But I go because my son invited me and his kids could use the roots of such a trip.

I'm buying flowers at the supermarket.

American Wars

The United States has been  active militarily since its creation.  The number of wars we have declared are not nearly so clearly counted.    Since the American Revolution, the USA has been in 5 declared wars.  But since WWII, there is practically no peace time.

Overhearing something on NPR about the way the USA makes every war about themselves, I thought I'd dig around a bit, see if the speaker was right (I feared he was) and see if I could determine why, since we dropped any semblance of isolationism, we now considered ourselves to be the only ones that could keep the peace;  why only our type of government was acceptable.  God knows, many of us in this country quit buying that 50 years ago.

So, lets start with the War of 1812. (1812-1814) While I lost ancestors to this war, I never really understood it.  In my class, it was all about America.  What I didn't get was that it was actually about Europe, specifically Napoleon Bonaparte.  England did not want the new USA to partner with France--again.  It was also assisting Native American leaders in fighting against the westward expansion of the USA.  I would hate that more if I didn't know what imperialist colonizers the British were at that time.  At any rate, the main cause was an inability to agree on trade with other countries/embargos and fighting to take over the rest of the continent.

The next declared war was the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Well, we fought this on foreign soil due to "manifest destiny".  You know, The USA is going to be from Atlantic to Pacific Ocean.  We were expanding our territories.  (Don't we fight other countries when they try to take territory from their neighbors?)  We were not exactly the good guys here.  Just greed and bullying in the image of Great Britain.  Not once in school did I ever learn anything about Mexico except the Aztecs cutting hearts out of people.  I know nothing about Mexico in the late 1840s.  I do know that when a war is fought where you live, the people shooting and looting and destroying your home are not seen as heroes but as invading monsters.

Then came the Spanish-American War fought in 1898.  This started with the sinking of the Maine (later determined not to be caused by the Spanish military) and ended with the freeing of Cuba to develop its own government and the changing of Guam and Puerto Rico to US ownership and Spain sold the Phillipines to the US for $20,000,000.  This took Spain out of the Americas and by serendipity, having no colonies to focus on, resulted in a Spanish renaissance at home.

The next official US war was World War I.  The US participated from 1917 to 1918 fighting against Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire.  It started with an assassination by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1914. An escalation of threats and mobilization orders followed the incident, leading by mid-August to the outbreak of World War I, which pitted Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire (the so-called Central Powers) against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy and Japan (the Allied Powers). The Allies were joined after 1917 by the United States. The four years of the Great War–as it was then known–saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction, thanks to grueling trench warfare and the introduction of modern weaponry such as machine guns, tanks and chemical weapons. By the time World War I ended in the defeat of the Central Powers in November 1918, more than 9 million soldiers had been killed and 21 million more wounded. (from history.com)
So the USA was there the last year of 4 bloody years, but every show I ever saw on WWI was about the US military heroics.  It was fought in Europe. Of the 9 million deaths, US deaths were estimated between 53,000 and 150,000.  I do not think WWI is about the United States.  We lost people and those people will be forever mourned, but this is not our story.

The next official war is WWII.  While my grandfather was in the first world war, my father and practically every man his age (it seemed) was in the second world war.

The USA was in WWII from 1941-1945.

Overview of World War II  (Digital History ID 2922)
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths.

World War II started in 1939.  The USA joined the allies in 1941 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

The US was horrified that our Naval yard was bombed.  Globally, the deaths from this war had been going on for 2 years and we were shocked that someone attacked us.  Amazingly,  the shows I saw as a kid were always about the glories of US soldiers fighting evil, never about the Allies pre-1941, and god-forbid if they had been from the side of the enemy.

In addition to these declared wars, there have been eleven Congressionally approved actions and 7 UN authorized while funded by congress peace-keeping things.  Interestingly, the Vietnam War, from 1964-1973 was one of the first type  ( I had a roommate that lost her soldier father in Vietnam several years before 1964--my first clue that they weren't telling us everything), and the Korean War, 1950-1953 was one of the second kind.

In the 1800's, we fought about trade, pirating, slave trading, and the acquisition of territory.

In the 1900's, we fought about stopping regimes we saw as against our best interests, translate that as fear-mongering over "communism" and loss of access to cheap natural resources.

In this century, its confusing.  We want the oil.  We hate their religion.  We hate kings.  We don't like who they voted into power.  We jump into other people's civil wars and revolutions, then ignore genocides and slavery.  There is no rhyme or reason---until you look at the strangely woven corporate loyalties and political intrigues that determine which bad guy is good and which bad guy is our enemy.

But of all of those wars, only 2 have been fought in our land--the American Revolution and the American Civil War.  Those were about us.

There rest of them really are someone else's stories.  We need to not be so egocentric. 

.

The United Nations

What if:

• The United Nations really was a global peace keeper?
• What if every nation treated their membership in the group as their "golden ticket" to participation in global commerce.
• What if members of the United Nations could not go to war and only the United Nations could decide to send troops to an area to maintain peace.
• What if all military personnel of a nation, participated in activities in their own nations, working with peaceful needs such as disaster relief.
• What if all military personnel of a nation were dually a part of the United Nations military and participated as needed to protect the peace of the world.
• What if, nations that were not members were not considered to be global participants, thus losing their rights to trade with nations that were members.
• What if the most important thing we did was offer to help nations that weren't members, assistance in meeting requirements for becoming members, and improving the human condition of their citizens.

That is a lot of what ifs, but WHAT IF?

When looking back, there has been one instance of UN participation in a police action--we called it the Korean War, and....we won?  Two of the countries backing the civil war, and it was a civil war, north versus south, (there but by the grace of god goes the USA), were the People's Republic of China--new and not a member and the United Soviet Socialist Republic- a charter member of the United Nations.  That whole thing was part of the bloody fight against socialism, the start? of the Cold War.  A shame that Stalin and Mao Zedong grabbed the reins of people's fights against the usual oligarchies and turned them into their own, private dictatorships.  Both are huge countries.  Could the UN have kept those two nations from becoming human rights nightmares?  I don't know.  But most of the civil wars, revolutions and police actions between 1947 and now were more about controlling another country's natural resources and creating puppet regimes that were friendlier to the wants and desires of the backing nations.  The United Nations could have said and done something about that.

If the United Nations hadn't had its teeth pulled and claws removed at its initial creation.




Those nations that like to call themselves the world leaders, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the United States,  you know, the rich countries that were known as colonial giants, that half the little revolts and wars were to get out from under, didn't want to be told they couldn't go in and create havoc.  They just wanted the other countries to not be able to create havoc.

Above is a map of members of the members of the United Nations. The yellow spots are non-members, can you see them, I know it is tough--but I think there are 2 yellow spots in Africa.

Since the creation of United Nations, there has been an endless stream of wars, and while many are civil wars and revolutions and bloody coupes, most have had the monetary and political and war machine assistance of those same military giants, but not for peace, or humanity or justice.

For Profit.

We don't back people because they are poor and have an awful life and an expectation of an early death.  We back wars because we want the oil, or the diamonds or the cheap labor or the wonderful farm produce that won't grow anywhere else.

For Profit,  for our (read our as the leaders, the shakers and movers, the rich and powerful) personal profit.

And when we decide, as a nation, to send our troops, we don't send the sons and daughters of our leaders, our political leaders, our corporate leaders--we send the sons and daughters of those people that have their children join for the possibility of a job, a chance to get an education that they otherwise couldn't afford, a chance at a better life--or death.

For Profit.

How many wars could be avoided if the citizens of a place were free to participate in the governing of themselves.

How many wars could be avoided if a country that was not a member of the UN could not sell goods outside their own country. ( Oh My!  we can't get their stuff?  we can't take advantage of their lack of human rights? No, I need my diamonds and chocolate and tiger skins and elephant tusks, without all that, how can I show how filthy rich and powerful I am)

How many civil wars and revolutions could be avoided if the UN assisted them in building their infrastructure, building schools, obtaining medicine, starting businesses that allowed all participants in the business a livelihood.

Imagine a world in which the war machine, the weapons factories, the defense research were all redirected toward the good of mankind: instead of weapons, farm equipment and playground equipment, instead of defense research, medical research for those orphan illnesses and those diseases that attack the poor--we have spent enough on erectile dysfunction and baldness to last 5 lifetimes.

Until those nations that originally created the United Nations see it as more valuable than themselves, more important toward world peace, instead of like an club to hold over the heads of the less powerful nations while they continue to do as they want, we will continue in our endless cycle of war...

For Profit.

If you have never been poor...

Imagine yourself in a desert; sand for miles, when it is hot it is oven hot and when it is cold it is freezing.  There is no food unless you can eat insects or maybe cactus and there is no water to drink.  There is no where to buy what you need.  And no place to get a job.  There are other people, many other people, in the same situation you are.  If one of them pulls out a bottle of water or a candy bar, the fight for who gets to consume it is on.

Now change the scenery.

You are in an urban area surrounded by dilapidated buildings, failing vehicles, and there are thousands of other people, also in this area.  There is no where to work.  There are no places to live that have functional heat or air.  The water is contaminated, plumbing doesn't work, and electricity is frequently off--nonpayment or failed infrastructure.

There is no where to buy anything but liquor or junk food within walking distance.  No one has a car that works.  The bus service is not easily accessed from here and taxi's and Uber won't go there.  No one can pay for the ride, anyway.  The refrigerator doesn't work even when the electricity is on.  There ARE insects but no one wants to eat them or even live with them, but there isn't any cactus.

I have spent my life living paycheck to paycheck.  I have been broke.  I have even had a few of times that I couldn't eat a meal.  I have never truly been poor.

I have worked with people that were poor.  I have taught people that were poor.  I have talked with people that have always been poor.  But I have never been poor.

Paycheck to paycheck is tough, scary, anger-inducing, hopeless, tiring and depressing.

Poor is a whole other level of living.

When you are poor, a nurse or a plumber are part of the rich folks.

When you are poor, owning a house makes you middle class--and that is if it is a little house in a questionable neighborhood--mcmansion is rich.

When you are poor, you know you need to get lucky, catch a break, be a superstar if you are ever going to do better.

I have talked with 13 year olds that thought that having a baby so they could get WIC and SNAP was going to be a better life.  I have seen 14 year old boys that broke the law so they could quit sleeping in the park--the park at night was scary.  I have talked with homeless people about taking care of their chronic diseases and their response is not how, but why?  Why?

Healthcare routinely treats homeless people as if going back to the street was both a choice and their home.  I have never heard any child say "when I grow up, i want to be homeless".

Schools enroll students by utility bill as proof of residence.  I would see kids out there in the streets during school days, never in school, and wonder if they were homeless and thus couldn't enroll.

We hear of people being arrested for sticking a roast down their pants and trying to walk out of a store.  We have seen people shoplift from dollar stores.  Junk food in convenience stores near schools is always a hot item.  Why are people stealing cheap items and food?  Don't confuse them with the super-rich teenager whose lawyer gets them out for emotional problems when they try to steal a 2,000$ scarf that they had the cash to buy in their purse.  We are talking survival-type thefts.  We are talking about people that are stealing items so cheap its hard to even call it petty theft, but for which the person stealing it has a need, whether physical or emotional, but no cash.  Maybe it is hunger.  Maybe they just can't keep listening to a loved one wish for such a little thing while knowing it is so far from possible.

We wonder about crime in places of  deep poverty. It is why it is so easy to blame the poor for their own situation. But in truth, when enough people are excluded from the mainstream successes and abundance and hope, they will find a way to make their own.  Such has been the cause of organized crime, cartels, and gangs since time began.  When the population of those excluded from participating in the world of opportunity and abundance becomes large enough, they create their own opportunities and abundance, and those don't fit the rules of the larger society.  The poor neighborhoods do not always hate them.  They can be seen as more Robin Hood than plague,  especially to those whose desperate needs are ignored by the "legitimate" government.

Its hard to understand that when we are  broke, cash-strapped, employed but going no where while following the rules, how so many people can be complaining about poverty and yet embracing lives of crime and drugs and sexploitation.  For most of us that talk about hard times, we have a roof over our heads all the time, the utilities may be on notice, but rarely get turned off.  Our kids go to school, and while a public school education is not currently turning out world-class educated citizens, it will teach you to read and print and do simple math.  If you are very lucky, your child will have a teacher that connects with them and still cares enough to try to make a horrible curriculum provide valuable information and insight.  Being broke is nothing like being poor.

We broke folks like to think of ourselves as sort of middle class.  We envision the poor as brown and ignorant, morally bankrupt and chemically dependent.  But where did we get that expectation.  Media has tried to keep that going. In fact, the recipients are as likely to be white as black or brown; as likely to speak English as another language.  In many states, being male makes being assisted unlikely without a physician saying you have a problem; drugs, alcohol. mental, emotional or physical, no disability, no assist. Since most of this group only gets healthcare through emergency rooms, they are unlikely to have someone diagnose them with more than "drug-seeking".  No disability papers, no further intervention.  Women with children are the most likely to qualify.  Women without children only slightly more likely than men. In about half the states, the amount of assistance can be more than the pay of a minimum wage job.

Why wouldn't the minimum wage be determined by the money number that equals the poverty level.  Why do we have jobs that will not pay a living wage.  How do we have business owners that don't work in their own business while claiming that they don't make enough to pay someone enough to live.  If you aren't working there, but are making enough for all kinds of extras, why?  Why do you get extras like playing golf  and fancy vacations while your employee needs government assistance?   If your business can't afford to pay someone for their time, you might be the one that needs to be working.

When someone gets rich off the uncompensated or undercompensated  labor of another, that is wrong.  We called it wrong when we made slavery illegal.  We called it wrong when children were worked instead of educated, and it is still wrong.

So finally, why do we have approximately 20% of the population in the wealthiest nation in the world falling near or below the poverty level.  Why are so many children living there.  How did that happen.  How can that be right.  How can we let that continue.  If the annual income of this country was spread out more evenly, no one would make less than $50,000 a year.  

We could still be periodically broke--but no one would ever need to be poor again.

Cultural dissonance

In Cognitive Dissonance their are feelings of discomfort that result from holding two conflicting beliefs. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.

In human culture these days, there is what I will call Cultural Dissonance.  That is the individual and social consciousness--what some people think of as waking up on a political/community level--that is causing many people to seek a societal answer to the differences between what we all know is right and what is currently being shoved down our throats as (chose your poison) just the way things are; normal corruption; money talks, bullshtick walks; business as usual; how the world works; one hand washes the other; you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours;  it's not personal, it's business; how power works; survival of the fittest.

Every religion, spiritual belief system, philosophical belief system and even secular humanism--which denies being a belief system, share certain ideologies about how to act.  Chief among those is the golden rule--treat others as you want to be treated.  Not far behind is you reap what you sow, otherwise stated as what goes around comes around, and live by the sword, die by the sword.  In other words, if you don't treat others like you want to be treated, it will come back to haunt you--whether in this life or the next.

Other truisms; be honest, be true to your word, don't take what isn't yours, whether it is a life or a material object or an opportunity that is obtained by removing the same from another person.   Be a good steward, care for what you have, do what you say you will do, don't put material things above living creatures.  There are a million variations of these but it all comes down to the same thing, treat others as you want to be treated.

So why, right now, or maybe now and at all times previously, but well hidden due to no open internet-type phenomenon, are we seeing so much corruption of roles.  It's not just the petty bureaucrat that does more or faster for a small bribe, its a system that no longer works at all unless money is greasing the wheel.  It is health care aimed at profit not helping people, it is education aimed at mining government loan money with no concern for providing an education that is either high quality or valuable to the person borrowing the money for the school.  Its keeping jails full to fill for-profit jails and prisons and drug trials more interested in getting a drug out there than in whether it both safe and effective.  It's farmers getting money for not planting, or for throwing out their crops to keep prices high while there are people hungry..

Why are we doing these things--and worse things: Wars to keep the weapons factories pulling in the money.  Coups to give new leaders a position so they can favor the rich backer for trade protections, people working in virtual slavery conditions to mine diamonds, farm coffee, cotton, chocolate.  Children whose only value is for the free labor they provide until they fall over dead is just not thought about while we brag about the great buy we made at our favorite discount store.

We complain about people getting assistance with rent, utilities, food, then complain again about worn out and degrading neighborhoods and then complain some more because the homeless people with their carts and dirty clothes are so unpleasant to look at. 

How much of that is the flip side of seeing the top 2% of the wealth owners live lives that look luxurious, that get away with murder and cheating and lying and stealing and it just makes them richer.  How much of crime is just the poor kid standing in front of the candy store window day after day watching well dressed children get whatever they want and then throwing what they don't want in a trashcan.  How much is envy and jealousy.  How much is absolute horror that their own offspring will have no more opportunity to do better than they had, or their parents or grandparents.  How much is fear that all those excuses:  just the way things are; normal corruption; money talks, bullshtick walks; business as usual; how the world works; one hand washes the other; you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours;  it's not personal, it's business; how power works; survival of the fittest, will continue like a twisted mantra to keep the rest of us hopeless and downtrodden and barely energetic enough to keep going to a job that will never take us anywhere but to old age and an early death.

If I was one of those 2% at the top, would I also be blind to those that have too little?  Would I also pat my self on the back for being a hard worker and a smart businessman and wise enough to be born in the right family?  Would I share out money that I would never use anyway to my pet charity and tell myself what a good person I am?

I am not a hero.  I am not a great activist.  I did not join the Peace Corp or the military or Greenpeace.  I did not take my service education to needy places and work for no money to help those worse off than I was.

I did struggle to pay my bills, take care of my children that, now grown, are very concerned with their children's clothing, and opportunities to participate in school and after school activities--because I was raised in handmedowns and home sewed clothes, and could only afford a single activity per child, and sometimes not that.  I did feel guilty that I could not offer them annual summer trips to nice places.  I felt bad that I could not pay for their college and amazed that my own parents had done better with their own family.  I was terrified when the job I had paid no insurance or only the employee, but would cover family for roughly half of the already stretched paycheck.  Suddenly every accident, every cold was a potential loss--life, debility, house, child--none were acceptable, all were too horrible to consider.  The balance was too delicate.  Everyday was a day that treading water might change to drowning.

I  try empathize with those whose own situation is worse than mine, people whose childhood was so poverty-stricken that their parent or parents were struggling just to feed them, or had given up on them, so ravaged by lack and despair that they could not even think of them so they sought escape--drugs, money, a better spouse, any spouse, someone to help, someone to make them forget, something.  Those children could not benefit from school.  They could not concentrate on anything but their own fears and  hunger and pain.  But empathy implies thinking about it, and thinking about it is so painful and so hard to do anything about.  And empathy does not actually fix problems unless the problem is hate.

We do have a lot of hate right now.  We do want to blame those that are worse off than we are for being worse off than we are.  It helps us not have to empathize or do anything.  And if we are also struggling, we want someone to blame.  It is always easy to blame those worse off.  And blame leads to hate--especially when those in horrible situations become so downtrodden they commit crimes to stop being poor, or take drugs to stop feeling powerless and guilty.  We don't like it that there are people getting help from our taxes, money we could have used ourselves.  We don't like it that we are not rich and powerful and capable of giving our families anything they want and of giving our favorite charities great gifts.  We hate those people that are taking our tax money and filling our jails and ignoring their responsibilities while using drugs.

We hate them, because hating them is so much easier than empathizing with their plight.  It feels so much more righteous than the powerlessness of knowing your own children have to get a college scholarship by playing sports or and instrument or studying constantly.  It feels so much less scary than "there but by the grace of god, go I"