Maybe They Need Heard Too

Madame,

“Lots of people tend to think of our problems in little compartments that don't affect anything else. It may be our fatal mistake.”

Well said.  You keep spinning the gold!

Our blind and often destructive bludgeoning of nature to force it to do our will is meeting the lack of wisdom we have exercised in that force of will.  Various short-term tasks or challenges we “successfully” address blow back on us with consequences we have chosen to not foresee. As just the honeybees example demonstrates, we can probably dispense with the sapiens sapiens part of our species classification.  Maybe even the sapiens part entirely!

Or maybe we should just auto-exclude America, as we seem to lead the charge into unwise behavior—and our behavior then manifests into 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th order effects across the rest of the world.  Yes, yes, there is much wrong in the world that is not a result of America’s actions and inactions, but the America-can-do-no-wrong crowd are injurious fools for failing to acknowledge where we have gone and do go rogue.

We know why many of us refuse to acknowledge reality, or worse, distort it or allow others to distort it for us:  “Reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety.  Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent with our assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us.” Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership.

I see and hear many angry statements from the above crowd. Are those statements not in most cases the result of anxiety? Anxiety that deep down they know something is off and maybe wrong, that their world-view is not consistent, that the world is changing in many ways, that their previously established “standard order” is transforming and they’re not ready for it to do so, that despite supporting the views and policies they have that things are not getting better and in fact are getting worse?  Are they not people who do not know what their place in the world might become, but in any case are fearful that it might not be a good place—at least not as good as what they’ve become accustomed to?

Is there a way to reach out to them in their anxiety?  And, especially, is there a way for those who will collectively become the new majority to reach out to them?  To acknowledge their fear, the anger, the anxiety, the division, and then try to transcend it?  That maybe if we acknowledge that we hear their anxiety, that we can then address its roots and have healthy, healing conversations about all that?  Or is this vocal quarter so resolutely, blindly, destructively on the wrong side of history that the tide of history must simply wash them aside until they are ready to swim with it?

I think we as society should be strongly seeking to answer the above.

Your ideas for positive, empowering action should be heeded by all.  The depressive assault must be combatted, and people must empower themselves to the greatest extent—the various political and economic and institutional systems out there are rarely if ever going to do it. 

Seeing “Tomorrowland” might help a bit.  No spoiler alerts here though! :)

Connect Or Die

Madame M:

I did not know.  Thanks for the education!  How very many things there have been throughout history that have been subverted and perverted away from the originator’s intent.  Thinking about that makes me wonder how likely it would be that my Independence Week idea could be corrupted in much the same way.

You and I have not met in person in quite a while now, and we are both not the richer for it!  If we feel that way, how much the letter writers from the days of difficult and long travel must have felt it even more.

When the female bees demonstrate social and economic cooperation, amazing how much easier and more satisfying things seem to be.  In the book The White, which I mentioned once before, a similar phenomenon was demonstrated among the Native American women, of whose society the white woman had become part of.  She contrasted it with the hectic, overworked, highly stressed life her white mother had lived in the hyper-individualistic society of her youth.  When are we going to be ready to take our lesson?  Our good friends the Scandinavians have demonstrated that one does not have to give up one’s individualism to live in a cooperative society.

Yes, we need men and women of calm and reason in aggrieved and put-upon communities.  But as you rightly intimate, if we just end only with our very, VERY large expectation—that the repressed and victimized swallow their emotions and not “get out of hand” or “go violent”—then we will have selfishly, arrogantly, compassionlessly failed to be siblings to our fellow human beings.

What’s more, we will be self-blind to the intricate pattern we are ourselves woven into.  Because just like about environmental responsibility, in social and economic responsibility, we keep thinking there can be an “away.”

But sooner or later, there isn’t.  The social and economic injustice we inflict, or even that we permit or look the other way and deny about, has a way of coming back to haunt us.  Even if we don’t make the connection.  The brutalized, the marginalized, the communities nearly sucked dry of hope, the young with no real opportunity, the lack of ever growing up safe or getting to feel safe, the ever-present racism (both overt and subtle) that infects law enforcement and society both like an angry poison—how dangerously foolish we are to think that all that can be contained or quarantined. 

Things spill out, spill over, spread.  Those with few options and little to lose are a powder keg of hostile variability.   It happens in the Middle East, and it happens right here. 

Except we keep missing the connections.  That actions and lack of actions have consequences, sometimes delayed years or decades, but consequences nonetheless.  Robbery, drugs, kidnappings, violence, death, to name just a few.  Where there is little or no justice, there is no peace.  Where there is little or no fairness, there is no tranquility.  Where there is marked economic inequality, there is no sustainability.

Connection may be our only hope.  We need—desperately—to reconnect with each other. 

Because the alternative is, for both us individually and as society, literally killing us.

Perspective and Prospective

Madame:

The “drifting” of power and money to the few does indeed take place all the time, because the majority of people are concerned with living their lives, not seeking to amass great power and wealth.  And power and wealth tend to slowly beget more power and wealth.

Largely, only the driven, ambitious, focused, etc. care to amass great power.  Unfortunately, those are also more likely to have among them great numbers of sociopaths, megalomaniacs, the dangerously insecure, the unenlightened, the monstrously selfish, etc., not to mention the hypocritical and shallow.  Even more unfortunately, many of them will not even be satisfied with fomenting the “drift,” but will move rapidly to strongly and unscrupulously to either 1) serve bad power, or 2) amass bad power for themselves.  The cycle will continue at least until we both infuse in ourselves the sentiment that Jefferson repeated—the price of liberty is eternal vigilance—AND find a way to improve the human mental, emotional, and spiritual condition to vastly reduce the numbers of sociopaths, megalomaniacs, etc.

Which also means the better rule sets we craft and enforce, the better the playing field can contain the attempted excesses.

Still, there is no doubt that perspective needs to be maintained.  For instance:

“News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.  You never see a TV crew reporting that a country isn’t at war, or that a city hasn’t had a mass shooting that day.  Or that millions of 80 year olds are alive and well.

“Violent crime has fallen by half since 1992, and fiftyfold since the Middle Ages.  Over the past 60 years the number of wars and number of people killed in wars have plummeted (Prof note: The carnage of WW2 made that comparison too easy).  Worldwide, fewer babies die, more children go to school, more people live in democracies, more can afford simple luxuries, fewer get sick, and more live to old age.

“Problems that look hopeless may not be; human ingenuity can chip away at them. “We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.” Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist

“When things are bad, do good.”  Little known motto of a major charitable organization.

“I could do other things.  Make more money.  But I choose to be here, teaching here, because I believe in YOU.  That some of you are going to change the community, our society, even the world for the better. May your days be filled with passion, may you have a wonderful, exuberant career.”  Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, explaining to students why he teaches at Berkeley.

“The free MUST remember the oppressed.” Amnesty International motto.

Muslim countries often don’t charge interest.  They have fees for transactions and pay dividends instead.  There are ways to think outside the box, and it may make greed not quite so damaging.

And if we are paying attention, we will always find life more wonderfully complex than we realized.  For instance (‘free market” fanatics may want to hold their heads to contain any explosive force), competition in Europe has often been CREATED by governments.  Certainly this is so for the phone service there, with the added twist that the governments forced the phone companies to be interoperable (one of the reasons phone service is generally much better in Europe than in the US).

I am, as you know, no advocate for pollyanish thinking, outlooks, or behavior.  But I also know that we can do much to make ourselves better.  One of the ways is to embrace the written word.  As Levar Burton asks, do your children, friends, family, and colleagues see you reading?  How many books do you have around home?  Do you have an evening a week where you don’t watch TV or do other things, but just read?  

Our reply to those who focus ONLY on negativity, who do so without contribution or desire for action to change, can thus be two simple questions: “What good book are you reading?  What are you filling yourself up with intellectually and emotionally?”

And yes, good Madame, I realize that I am speaking to the choir!  Try not to roll your eyes. :)

Personal Values

Madame:

I am recovering, slowly.

I believe the good English gentlemen would comment that we have diminished ourselves.

The gas guzzler truck mania is well in swing around here as well.  Self-delusion and self-justification are in full swing.  Plus there’s a lot of mental and emotional unresolved issues to boot I’m guessing.

Time capsules are always a bit problematic because what we truly should store—massive data—does not hold up well typically for long, unrefreshed storage, for a variety of reasons.  That’s a pity, because everyday life needs to be depicted.  Social history is needed, but often the most shortchanged.

What definitely should be included are measurements of where we are.  Soil, air, water, resource depletion, reserves, etc.  A long listing of where exactly things stand at the moment in history.  And what we value—and no longer value.  What we’re concerned about—and no longer concerned about.  How we communicate, and how we no longer communicate.

We also need the words of every day  people and their concerns, hopes, plans, etc.

They might despise us a little less if we include an apology to future generations as well.  That we didn’t take action, better action, sooner action.

Our mistake, unfortunately (mine too especially), has been thinking that “changes” could be “fit in” among ALL our entertainment—sports, games, shows, movies, etc. The result?  We have “fit in” little or nothing.  Neil Postman was right—we have amused ourselves to death, and in the process let ourselves become near defenseless and near powerless against the corporate and individual oligarchs (and the politicians and judges who serve them) who dictate to us with near impunity.

My father always said I had too many hobbies and not enough focus.  I truly, magnificently, deeply enjoy games, movies, entertainment, and other recreation.  It’s just that I now realize I can’t really enjoy them like I want to when I know that American and maybe world civilization appear to be sinking towards a dark abyss.  It’s like trying to enjoy dinner and dancing aboard the Titanic when one knows ahead of time what’s about to happen.  I would much rather right our course so I could truly enjoy my hobbies, without guilt, without that terrible feeling that I am sinning against my children and their future.

The oligarchs hold a great weapon over us—fear.  Of jobs, of security, of personal safety, and other Maslow hierarchy basic needs.  There is a small amount of time yet to resist and reverse the slide toward overt totalitarian control.  But it can’t be mere intention.  It has to be that action thing.

Those who can be activists, great, engines like you are sorely needed.  For the rest of us, two things:

1.     Make your choices fit your values, even in little things when you can.  Here’s an example I used in my choices.  I like green tea.  Since I’m going to buy green tea, I decided if necessary I would buy less of it if what I did buy supported values I agreed with.  There are probably several that do.  The one I settled on was Organic India.  Why?  Listen to their story—“At the heart of Organic India is our commitment to be a living embodiment of love and consciousness in action.  We work with thousands of small farmers in India to cultivate sustainable organic farmland.  All our products produce health and True Wellness and are made with loving care.  Each product is one link in a chain of love and connectedness between Mother Nature, our farmers, and you.  By choosing Organic India you are actively participating in our mission to create a sustainable global environment, provide training and a life of dignity to our farmers, and bring health and happiness to you while supporting well being and respect for all beings and for Mother Nature.”

2.     Simply starting a new conversation with those in your social circle is the second thing you can do.  And especially those of you who are skittish about being labeled “weird” or “radical,” there is a method to use.  Socrates gave it to us over 2000 years ago…

Ask questions.  It raises fewer defensive barriers and elicits fewer defensive reactions.  Questions like:  “Did you hear about X?  Have you ever thought about X?  Have you ever thought about why X?  What do you think we should do about X?  Does it bother you that X? Have you ever spoken to your friends and family about X? Do you think that Neil Postman was right?  Does it ever make you uncomfortable that X is happening while we amuse ourselves?  Have you read Aldous Huxley?  Have you read George Orwell?  Does that ever scare you?  Do you ever get uncomfortable when people you know know more about sports figures, sports teams, and celebrities than they do about all these things happening?  Am I making you uncomfortable now?  If so, why do you think that is?  What should we do about it?  Do you think we’re part of the problem?”

The alternative is to watch 1984 put into place.

30 Years Later

Madame:

Hard to believe, but the year just passed was 30 years after the year George Orwell set his famous novel in.

I am quite under the weather, but my concern about this topic is undiminished. 

Don’t expect Britain, Orwell’s country, to be the vigilants:

http://iainmacwhirter.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/1984-in-2014-have-we-learned-nothing-from-george-orwell/

From the land of Finland comes this warning (and TED talk):

http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/02/22/1984-vs-2014-george-orwell-was-an-optimist/

And who has been successfully prosecuted for the monstrous intrusions into private lives along with the manipulation?  What entire country has been up in arms over Watergate Exponential?

No one.  And none.  In fact, the only ones persecuted, prosecuted, jailed, or made fugitives have been—the whistleblowers.

Pullitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist James Risen has been one of those persecuted through both the Bush and Obama  administrations.  His latest book, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” is worth picking up as well.  While he does not believe we are yet in the 1984 mold, he believes we have traveled far down that road.

What would Huxley and Orwell think of us?

Year in View/Review

Madame M and Readers:

Good video.  The world needs considerable counterweight to the movement by corporations to gain control of the new precious resource:  clean drinking water.

At this year end, I thought a look back would be interesting.  While woefully incomplete and entirely random, here’s a list of 2014 dimly noted “importantes.”

40 million people came close to running out of water in Brazil.  (our insular-focused media probable barely or never told you).

The Islamic State group ran into all sorts of problems, as it was fated to.  When it started falling down on delivering electricity, repaired roads, and the like, the people started to get turned off by its repression.  Funny, someone might have mentioned that previously. :)

Scotland held a referendum that determined whether it remained part of the United Kingdom or became completely independent.  Voting was around 90%.  It stayed part of, by the way.

Voting in the US 2014 November elections averaged 37% of eligible voters, the lowest since WW2—when many voters were away because of the war.

Conservative George Will said these words:  “The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history, coincided with mission creep (“nation building”) in Afghanistan.”

29 year old Brittany Maynard was successful in her quest to show, in retired professor John Hardwig’s words, “that the best death is not necessarily the one that can be postponed the longest.”

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck said this about the Eric Garner case: “How this cop did not go to jail, was not held responsible, is beyond me.  It’s obscene.  It’s grotesque.”

Somebody actually said it: Congress should randomize all its chamber seating so that people sit with those not like them.  Now, according to standard molasses in winter time response in DC, it will be 10 years before this good idea MIGHT be acted on. Lol.

The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee finished its Benghazi investigation, and concluded, like all the other investigations before it, that…there was nothing significant to report.

Those working the hardest, dirtiest, most dangerous, and most dead-end jobs that nobody wants, in the places nobody wants to be, got a reprieve from threat of deportation.

A U.N. mandatory periodic review of U.S. compliance with the 156 nation, 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, cited the high incidence of US police brutality and shootings, the harsh conditions of imprisonment, and the severe interrogation methods used on detainees.  The review is ongoing.  Would seem the rest of the world has grown up, and we have regressed.  At the same time, neuroscientists released a report that says torture, even in the instances of no lasting physical harm, mentally damages the tortured person for life (sympathy for John McCain).  It also often leaves a mark on the torturer, as the documentary “The Act of Killing,” demonstrated.

In a body camera experiment in California, the use of force plummeted by 60 percent, and the number of complaints by 88 percent, because police and suspects “both knew that their actions would be observed by outsiders to the situation.”

How bitterly, tragically ironic that those policemen killed by the crazy murderer in New York were an Asian-American and Latino-American.

Net neutrality, Trans Pacific Partnership, and Ocean Acidification: Some of the most important, yet under-reported, issues this year.

ECONOMIST Roger Bezdek, a highly paid consultant to energy companies, was carted out by them as a “scientist,” to say that more CO2 in the atmosphere is actually a good thing because “trees will grow faster.”

Some failing, violent Philadelphia schools were turned around, not by adding even more security, but by stripping most of it away.  There is so much that can be said about that…

Even while many other indicators may not have been good, the worldwide rate of violence and mortality continued to go down.

Wanted to end my 2014 posts on an upbeat note. :)

What's That Ticking?

Madame:

Citizen ride-alongs do need far better publicized.  One wonders if the police really want the program all that much, given the poor promotion.

An important side-note to all of this discussion is that effectively no police officers are killed by actually unarmed assailants.  In all 57 cases since 2000, all of the officers were shot with their own weapon that the assailant or assailants had wrestled away from the officer (more argument-strength for those who point out that the UK and other countries whose regular police are unarmed do not have the same problem). It is not even possible to get accurate data of the number of unarmed African-Americans killed by police in the same time period, for that isn’t even reported or tracked for statistical gathering.  The best estimates are that it is many factors greater than 57.

“There are bigger issues than sports,” one person, a sports fan, remarked to a newspaper reporter who was asking why he was protesting the killing of an unarmed person from a race not his.  When enough people feel that way, things will have a great chance to start changing.

On to some of the other issues:

In the budget just passed by Congress and signed by Obama, there were many reprehensible things, from letting wealthy individuals inject even more money into politics, to overriding a citizens’ referendum in DC, to fomenting coal power plants abroad, to allowing companies to push already tired truckers to even more dangerous working hours, to making pre-school and school meals even less nutritious, to cutting funds for students’ Pell grants, to cutting IRS’s ability to audit returns, to undermining pension plans and future retirees.  But the biggest one was the ticking nuclear financial bomb inserted into the US and world economy. 

If one wants to see how the wealthy and big corporations have effectively taken over in the absence of our attention and concern, and in particular, how the finance industry has taken over, there was plenty of evidence before this budget.  From rock solid insider trading convictions being overturned, to Disney and the Koch brothers dodging US taxes via foreign countries, to colossal corporate and wealthy individual loopholes, tax breaks, and subsidies, to Citizens United and McCutcheon  vs. Federal Election Commission. 

But the Wall Street rider that was added to the budget, a rider that had nothing to do with the budget, was egregious in multiple ways.

Starting with the way it was inserted.  In secret, after most everyone thought all the work was done. Caught only by a sharp-eyed staffer.  No way to trace who did it, but obviously it had to have had the approval of key portions of at least House and probably Senate leadership.

And who was it written by?  A Citigroup lobbyist (Citigroup is one of the largest financial corporations), representing Wall Street money organizations.  And guess who called many congressmen to strongly urge (demand) its passage?  The most powerful CEO on Wall Street, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan (and formerly of Citigroup).

What does the provision do?  It removes one of the key protections enacted in response to the financial crisis that brought on the Great Recession and nearly took down the entire world financial system.  A protection that required separation between federally insured deposits and financial institutions’ risky derivatives (financial hedges or “bets”). 

Derivatives are financial gambling.  “This was the epicenter of the crisis.  This is what brought AIG down, what brought Lehman Brothers down,” a former US Treasury official explained to the Washington Post.

Now, US taxpayers (that’s “us”) are on the hook if the derivatives lose money, even if the losses are catastrophic.  But guess who gets to to keep the profits if the

bets pay off?  The financial institutions.

For them, all smiles.  For us, tick, tick, tick…

Legacy Matters

Madame:

I like it that when you politically and economically fantasize, you go all out! LOL

You ask big, complex questions, don’t you?  :)  I’m not a curmudgeon.  I’m enjoying the dickens out of the Royals and their infectious, fun enthusiasm for a game that Americans in this fast-paced society can otherwise find long and not very exciting.  We can enjoy those things.  Then we have to get busy on taking action. 

ONE stunted, skinny, weak little earthworm.  That’s all I found on a sidewalk after a hard and not brief rain.  Considering I walked over 200 feet, there should have been dozens. 

But then I remembered that a management company paid a “lawn care” company to “care for” the grass around that sidewalk.

What should we do, you ask?

One small thing is to quit silently agreeing that a “little” eco-injury is okay. 

REPEATEDLY.

When we want-what-we-want for various aesthetic  (“I like the way the grass—yes, I know, it’s grass only and mono-grass at that—looks”), selfish (“I like the way things are; I don’t want to do something different”),  justifying (“What I do won’t make a difference”), conditioning (“But it’s always been this way”), arrogant (“No one is going to tell me what to do”), etc. reasons, we pile up the eco-injuries. 

The strands of life are intricately interwoven, and our awareness and discernment  of the interwoven effects of our actions is far too limited.  Severing or twisting the strands—and a great number of them—is not GOING to have consequences, it IS having consequences.

Plan B, the book (and its continually updated versions) by Lester Brown, lays out what we must do.  It requires first, fortitude.  We the people must say that we will accept short-term pain and hardship—and a lasting change in habits and routines—in order to attain intermediate and long term benefit and sustainability.  We must say that we will not have our short-term selfish instincts exploited by the unscrupulous systems managers of the destructive status quo, by all the “can’ts” of the naysayers and problem pointers who have no sustainable solutions of their own, but only vague generalities.  We must say that we are thinking of our descendants, our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, our cousins, our friends’ children—the future Americans and future humans on this planet.  We must “get the wind in our sails” by embracing many of the ideas in the now nearly 25 year old documentary “After the Warming.”

To do that will mean we can’t be diverted by pseudo-solutions that are wonky, manipulatable, and only half-solutions at best.  Credits, caps, and other complex solutions will not be very effective. 

People, businesses, and markets react to, and plan well, on things they can directly see, anticipate, and measure.  That means a gradually increasing direct tax on fossil fuels and associated warming substances, with the heaviest taxation on the most polluting and most climate change contributing, until those substances and practices reach their true social costs.  With that sort of direct and painfully clear indicator, things will change rapidly, and a sustainable energy economy will come into existence.  Ingenuity and enthusiastic energy opened up by doing something people can believe in and get behind eagerly will accelerate the process even more.  The renewable energy economy is not a far off dream; it is waiting on the edge of this one, and the world is waiting on a hypocritical America to move, to trigger the momentum that will tide turn in the right direction. 

The collected taxes should go directly to practices that attempt to ameliorate the effects of climate change and, ideally, move to stabilize the change.  In the long term, the tax can be part of a broader paradigm of heavily taxing things that are injurious to the common good, and easing (or even largely eliminating) taxes on things which contribute to the common good.

Of course, the tax should be rebated back to at least those payers (directly or indirectly) who are at the poverty level, and maybe a bit beyond.  What it should not do in any way is go to the fossil fuel companies and other polluters.  Those will either change and embrace renewability and sustainability, or they can go the way of the horse and buggy industry.  Their past actions have done the opposite of earning them the right to any favorable treatment.

We are in the beginnings of crisis management as to climate change.  It will get worse before it stabilizes.  When we first stabilize, then drop back to 350 ppm, we will have reached the sizable turning point.  Of course, we may be a planet re-covered in trees by then.

This tax will have pain.  This tax will have negative consequences, from lost jobs, disrupted lives, to agonizing short-term hardships and inefficiencies—in a world economy where fossil fuels affects, directly or indirectly, nearly everything, any number of things , some of which we cannot foresee, are going to be disrupted, have bad side effects, or worse—when the instant and disposable thoughtless economy transitions and shifts.  This tax will have recessionary effects that could last 10 years—on people and small businesses already so economically and structurally weakened by the plutocratic transformation that six years after the Great Recession we have not really recovered.

But once that transition period has reached the synergy point, we will see the benefits reverberate and cascade, and the pain will rapidly turn to improvement.  We will reap many benefits.  We will assume well the mantle to be good stewards.  We will be, for the first time in a very long time, rightly and continually proud as a society—even a world society—at the results of our courage, hard work, and sacrifice.  We may even rediscover each other, and a slower pace that comes with reconnection.

And we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say, “I SACRIFICED FOR YOU, I HELPED CHANGE THE WORLD FOR YOU.  I LOVE YOU IN REAL DEEDS THAT TRULY MATTER, NOT JUST WORDS.”

“I DIDN’T LEAVE YOU A NIGHTMARE WORLD.”

Or we can have the opposite conversation. 

Madame Gets Answered

Madame:

Your question is complex. The answer partly depends on perspective on “evil” and “reformed (or transformed).”  The communist countries of Russia (and some other parts of the Soviet Union), as well as China, transformed their educational systems, as has Cuba, effectively going from largely illiterate to almost completely literate.

During much of the Progressive period in both Europe and the Americas, great reforms and forward strides were made in education.  The “relaxation” and “flowering” of here-thereto rigid German education was a part of this, although it would not see its full measure until after WW2.

Both Ghana and South Africa—for different reasons—have made significant reforms to their educational systems.

Israel—and Palestine, surprisingly—have instituted impressive educational systems, of course with different circumstances and different result measurements.

Considering the beginning and the rocky initial steps, Australian education has come impressively far.

The “Little Tigers” (e.g. S. Korea, Taiwan, etc.) built their now solid systems from nearly scratch, although, to be fair, they had a good amount of cultural legacy help.

Turkey after the Ottomans at the same time both consolidated and created whole cloth a new universal education system.  Of course, for 20 or more years, it was effectively under the control and direction of one set of people.

Even the American South  made impressive strides after the Civil War, albeit with some significant setbacks, going from a scant system to a pervasive one.

And the model we keep bringing up—Finland—was dissatisfied with its educational system and went through its own reform period after World War Two.

Yet there is a place I have mentioned before that probably best meets your question’s answer: Japan.  It is an incredible Japanese trait to be resistant to much change until the culture senses an overwhelming need, then change is dramatic and nearly total. Even pre-1868, some strides in education had been made, but the Meiji Restoration infused incredible transformative energy into the whole country—including education.  Setbacks, stifling, and even some degeneration occurred shortly up to and through WW2, but not too long after, another great change occurred, and the Japanese leapt forward.

Your sentiment about corporations and their employees after The Great Recession seems quite accurate.  Can you imagine what a Great Depression, sans a Rooseveltian interventionist administration and Congress, would degrade the attitude and treatment to?

Unions are often necessary, given the structure of capitalism, especially American capitalism.  They need governmental oversight of course.  Sometimes unions can be corrupt, selfish, short-sighted, frustrating, limiting its members’ productivity to the average or mediocre, and susceptible, when its members are minimally educated, to emotional manipulation and other malevolent things. 

I’ve known people who got turned against unions because of the above.  I myself  worked at a place during one summer where I had to pay union dues but got few of the benefits and a whole lot of poor treatment. 

Yet the alternative—no or weak unions—has been in the general shown to be QUITE disadvantageous to the average American worker—and the middle class as a whole.

Banned Books week—perpetual vigilance needed, especially in an era that is, for far too many Americans, post-book.   Apathy can be a catalyst for reactionary malevolence.

Well, I meant to get to talking about last week’s barely media-covered 400,000 person march in NYC on climate change, but I see my windbaggery has shelved that!  

A Profession Is Calling

Madame:

First, let’s make sure everyone knows what tenure is:  it is a legal contract that a non-probationary teacher can only be let go for certain specified reasons and by due process.   Tenured teachers are public employees whose generally meager economic remuneration is not supposed to be in yearly danger, barring certain things, as those teachers try to balance many competing priorities and demands from the public and the system.  

Like judges, particularly federal ones who have the judicial equivalent of tenure, public teachers are supposed to be shielded from the insistent, parochial demands of multitudes who would not only attempt to be their masters, but tear them in a hundred directions.  In theory, this allows the knowledgeable teacher to balance and cool those demands in favor of what is best.  In practice, this does not always work out well, but the alternative can be worse.  Teachers may not do WELL under tenure (for all the reasons and more of what I listed last week), but they would likely do worse without it.  Meager pay, high pressure, few benefits, and no job security?  Fast food education would loom.

The firing process for bad teachers has become embroiled in the defensiveness that constantly being under attack has made a lot of teachers’ unions, clouding discernment in a number of cases.  Attempts at getting teachers unions to properly police their own ranks have become stillborn because of the generalized attacks on the unions and teachers themselves. There’s also the contributing atmosphere of the general litigiousness of a disconnected society (and one with a large number of lawyers). 

A student in a public system with no tenure runs the risk of the teacher being bullied or cowed by the meddling and the overbearing, not to mention the truly economically or politically powerful, and all that would mean for a skewed “education.”  Teachers are also supposed to be not just a profession, but a calling.  That calling could get completely impossible if respect sank even further than it has now—and the lack of tenure would signal that.

Do we want our teachers to live in yearly fear of their jobs in addition to all the other things?  Do we want our childrens’ instructors to be nervous wrecks, anxious to please and not knowing which faction, which week, needs pleased the most urgently?

Well, stop-gap measures probably aren’t going to change much, but perhaps they can arrest some of the deterioration.  One of the prime ones is for us to quit telling teachers HOW they should teach, and give them some flexibility on WHAT to teach.  Guidelines (references can be often useful), not requirements, should replace much of the strictures now in place.  The standards , if such are necessary, should be measures of success much less crude than “test scores.” Measures such as the following might be better: community satisfaction, employers’ satisfaction, civic leaders’ satisfaction, higher institutions’ satisfaction, and, perhaps most importantly, the “5/10/20 year” satisfaction marks of the student.  That is, how well the student rates his or her education 5/10/20 years after each milestone (4^th grade, 8^th grade, 12^th grade).  This latter piece would not only increase constructive engagement of the society into the system, but provide reflection that is too often missing from this culture.

Another measure would be to present success stories—both domestic and international—to teachers and schools, and let them tailor to their own local situations (or justify why they disagree).  One of the readiest is to get teachers in front of some of the best teachers (and most innovative thinkers and practitioners), and let them be inspired—especially if a broad range of styles and personalities are presented so that each teacher can find a model they can learn from.   

Of course, in all this, removing many requirements and other bureaucratic weight is a must.  Teachers simply cannot do a great job under that pile.  Getting the freedom to try to do what they think is best will re-awaken teacher energy that has long been suppressed or deadened by the present system.  For instance, what if a teacher, instead of having everyone read the same thing, had an hour every day where students brought whatever they liked to read to class and read to themselves some, read aloud to others some, or even just talked about THEIR material some? With no judgment since it is the love of reading and the enthusiasm of sharing that is being emphasized. 

Naysayers of the above paragraphs might be reminded that it is hard to imagine a WORSE system because of it.  Criticism is justified when a better set of ideas are proposed!

Obviously, from how much I’ve written this week, this is a subject of endless windbaggery from me! :) Keep us informed about how the split in your local school system results!

That Policy Sucking Sound

Madame M:

Well, the occasional “business” person has (to be kind) often been far from impressive, although perhaps it’s because they haven’t been business people in the usual sense. 

Yes, with the exception of the first, it’s largely been a parade of lawyers, with the occasional ex-soldier thrown in.  Even Wilson the Progressive, who was an actual political scientist (rather than just having majored in political science prior to becoming a lawyer, as many lawyers do), was also a lawyer.   In addition, although he emphasized it a good deal less, Wilson was a historian.  Given Wilson’s enthusiastic support  and fascist-like enforcement of the reprehensible Espionage and Sedition Acts during the First World War, as well as what could be termed some of his sexist and racist views and actions, it is a caution to this historian and political scientist that not only are people complex and flawed, but power can twist even those who should know better!

In addition, historians in particular, but political scientists too, often have trouble coming to policy decisions.  Whether it’s because they get lost in “analysis paralysis” from looking at so many variables and instances and factors and possibilities, or if it’s just their academic natures, effecting of policy could be problematic.  Although historians can sometimes craft policies (or, rather, portions of policies), my confidence in their execution of said policies (and the quick/real time flexible adjustments necessary as the policy went along) would not be extremely high.

It’s probably better in most instances that historians and political scientists and other specialists sit in positions of high advisement, and have real, significant input into the crafting and execution of those policies.  Finding a decisive non-historian political leader who values historian and political scientist input is unfortunately all too rare in our society, and the few who do often lack the “charisma” factor that the fickle and intermittently attentive America public seem to require.

The Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld (and Wolfowitz, although he at least displays a small modicum of real reflection on it) et al, gang of barely-or-never-served-in-the-military foreign policymaking imploders have ensured that our treasury is depleted (the final financial bloodletting, once all costs—including VA—of the policy criminality of Iraq alone are projected into the future, will total in excess of $4-6 TRILLION dollars) and that our options from this point forward are poor.  Ironically, we now are not only probably propelled to some accommodation with Iran on what to do in Iraq, but have spurred into production far more terroristic individuals than have been eliminated.  The comments from the general American public, about wanting to stay out of something we so thoroughly broke in our willful ignorant arrogance, are probably closer to the least bad of all the now bad options there are.  Aside from the tribal difficulties of Iraq (a whole ‘nother animal), the triple sectarian contention of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias will be the Iraqis’ to sort out, likely quite violently.  Our efforts will probably be focused on dampening down any chain-reaction spiraling of involvement of those (Turkey and Iran, particularly) with interests there.  Such a “policy” by us will have a thoroughly mixed reaction in and on the rest of the region and world, but as you said, we have so royally screwed things up (and made possible so much other screwing up and machinations by others), it may be the least-bad option.  The Obama administration gets a good deal of criticism (this Prof may be one of its critics) for foreign policy dithering, but in fairness it’s also been left holding a smelly, rotten bag of crap.

I really was wanting to return us to lighter summer fare, and look at all the air that has been infused into the windbag! :)  Guess my lighter topic will have to wait until next week!

Iraq Questions

Professor J,

Hope your Father's Day was a great one.

Thanks for enlightening us on some of the history of the current situation in Iraq.  People in power never seem to look down the road and imagine all the troubles they cause when they set about carving up maps, even if they are doing it with good intentions. And historically, good intentions haven't had too much to do with it.

Oh, those unintended consequences.

Isn't part of our problem that we get leaders who tend to be lawyers or the occasional business person? How might a country with historians in position to make policy, domestic and foreign, look different? 

Of course that would entail imagining a world where education, history, and liberal arts are valued. All of these connections just keep tumbling in upon themselves.

I'll admit to not being up to speed for an in depth discussion of this situation due to a self imposed cut back on my access to news (or the media's access to me). Tough for a former news junkie. When I hear people bringing it up in conversation while out and about however, the overall sentiment is "why can't we stay home and mind our own business?"

And what's our moral obligation there (if any) given that we created a mass of problems (and destruction) and then left. Is the best course of action to let them solve their own problems even though we are largely responsible for many of them?

How does that play to the rest of the world?

The Price of Willful Ignorance

Madame:

Thank you for your comments.  I will keep working on it.

A tardy Happy Father’s Day to all fathers.  I am posting this behind schedule for that very reason!

Many subjects could be discussed at the moment.  Before we return to lighter summer fare, let me light amplify SOME on our Iraq “policy.”

Iraq is an example of why history is so important.  To really understand the Iraq of today, and especially, to have a meaningful clue as to how to address issues there, one needs to go back at least to the 1920s, and really, probably to the 600s or even earlier.  That mosaic is far too intricate to reproduce here, but suffice to say that decisions made are still reverberating with impact even today.

Because America doesn’t care to understand history like that, its “policies” don’t have lasting strength, they don’t have logic and true buy-in, and they end up blowing back (to borrow from the title of a must-read book) on us.  Further ironically, they don’t even work in the short-term.  We don’t have meaningful or informed discussion prior to “formulating” those policies, and we grasp at flailing ropes (which could be snakes for all we know) when another  perpetual “crisis” appears that seems to “demand” our national treasure and the lives of not just our people. but many people.

Look at the Iraq mess (which the unscrupulous are using for their own political and economic and other selfish ends).  We intervened on at best dubious circumstances (there were no weapons of mass destruction—as any regional specialist worth his salt knew that Saddam would try to make Iran (the historical enemy of Iraq) think that he had those weapons even if he didn’t; there were no terrorists—certainly none connected to 9/11—not because Iraq was a nice place; Saddam  was a murderous Stalinesque ruler—but  because he didn’t like them because they weren’t controllable).  We had no real plan, no end game, no think through.  We improvised when we were “surprised” that things didn’t go well in the aftermath, and then had to support yet another corrupt/incompetent/repressive/petty regime (how many times, AmeriRome, are you going to do that?) that we had little faith in (and, it turns out, neither did its people), and that our very own counter-insurgency/nation-building doctrine said was doomed to fail because of that fact.

So today we have an Iraq that was formerly one of the most secular places in the whole region now becoming militanized and religious extremized.  We have a mixed bag of people opposing a brutal and pathetic regime, but with the most effective of that mixed bag of opponents happening to be ruthlessly terroristic and medieval in outlook.  A group, however, that appears to have little interest outside Iraq and its immediate surroundings, and virtually none in wanting to strike at American targets on American soil.

And that could all change from the first bomb or missile of American intervention.

So:  1) we have created or vastly magnified the power of terrorists where previously there was virtually none, and 2) we have painted ourselves into a corner, where almost all our options look various shades of bad, almost no one trusts us, and there is virtually no confidence we will do the right thing.

That willful ignorance thing of ours is the knife in our own hand applied wildly and uncomprehendingly to our own back.

The Slow Fires of Consensus Build

Madame:

I know of no studies along the lines you describe.  However, the coverage has morphed out of the progressive outlets.  For instance, the OECD’s generally respected work; The University of Washington’s and USC’s recent studies; The Economist’s coverage; Robert Reich’s documentary, Inequality For All; and, particularly, French economist Thomas Piketty’s best selling (and for an economic!) book Capital in the 21^st Century. (More on this in a bit).

The winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Economics was recorded on October 19^th of last year saying that economic inequality in the world, and especially the US, is the most important economic concern, perhaps THE most important concern.

Perhaps most indicative of a shift could be the Wall Street Journal (note: the WSJ is not noted for pro-labor or economic equality sentiments) article entitled “A Bipartisan Consensus on Economic Inequality?”  From the article:

In a respected Pew poll, a majority of Americans are strongly concerned about economic inequality.  Of course Democrats heavily are, but so are Independents.  What’s even more telling?  “To be sure, the share of Democrats (90%) who think that government should do something to reduce the gap is twice that of Republicans (45%). Still, it is significant that nearly half of a party more hostile to the public sector than in previous generations believes that inequality calls for a response beyond family responsibility and private charity.”

“More frequently than in recent years, one hears Republicans repeating Jack Kemp's famous motto: People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Now GOP leaders and presidential aspirants are delivering speeches about poverty and opportunity.”

Readers are encouraged to read the whole (short) article: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304117904579499790499812228

Economist’s Piketty’s blockbuster book (even more spectacular given it is a 700 page goliath) sounds warnings that come from a field generally noted for its pro-business, pro-growth, capitalism-cheerleading sentiments.  Its message has attracted attention beyond those expected to incline to agree.  Possibly because Piketty’s writing is easy for the layman to understand, and easy for that layman to place that understanding in his or her consciousness: “The US economy has begun to decay into the aristocratic Europe of the 19^th century.  Hard  work will matter less [for the majority of people], inherited wealth more.  The fortunes of the few will unsettle the foundations of democracy.”

“Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck. Sometimes, meritocratic arguments are used by the winners of the game to justify the role of unlimited inequality. I don't think there is any serious evidence that we need to be paying people more than 100 times the average wage in order to get high-performing managers.”

Read the newspaper interview with the author here: http://www.timesheraldonline.com/ci_25620723/q-amp-french-economists-grim-view-wealth-gap

Of course, readers have had frequent reminding from me about how the disconnection between self-serving, self-focused, wealthy “elites,” and the mass of the rest of the citizenry, played an exceedingly strong role in the decline and fall of the Roman Republic and the eventual collapse of the Roman Empire.

I have not even begun to respond to the rest of your post, and I have much to say about it!  I will next week though!

Bear Watching

Madame:

I have just returned from a short-notice trip to Panama, so this posting is not only a bit tardy, but will be unavoidably shorter (why am I not hearing any sighs? Lol).

There is a small flame near a whole lot of both kindling and dry wood.

I do not know if it will be blown out before it “catches,” but it has the potential to be a powerful movement for change.

Economic inequality.

Not the “normal” kind that results from differences in merit, hard work, intelligent application, and a bit of good fortune.

This is structural inequality, where economic opportunity is inhibited for most and accentuated for a relative few.

And increasing numbers in not just the country, but the world, are waking up to the seriousness of it:

“A wide range of social problems are worse in societies with bigger income differences.  These include physical and mental illness, violence, low math and literary scores among people, lower levels of trust and weaker community life, poor child well-being, more drug abuse, lower social mobility, and higher rates of imprisonment and teenage births.” Richard Wilkinson, professor emeritus, social epidemiology, University of Nottingham.

To make matters worse and self-accelerating (to this—perhaps!—tipping point),  the far greater wealth, power, and influence of the very wealthy have helped make the middle class feel less influential,more apathetic, and often even powerless, driving reduced voting and increasing apolitical behavior, leaving the “field” to the manipulators and the fringes.

But creeping into even the heavily wealth-influenced traditional media has been slowly growing numbers of individuals who have sounded the alarm. 

And that bears watching to see if a significant reaction, the possibility of which I mentioned in the last post, has begun.

We’ll see.  Maybe there’s more to the public’s interest in the Hunger Games, etc. than sheer entertainment!

Why The Long-Term Can Be Favorable

Madame:

Thank you for the look into juror duty.  It’s ironic, but this political science professor has never served on juror duty or even made it as far as you did.   It’s a pity (you may feel differently, lol) you didn’t go all the way through to be able to give us the all-the-way-through picture.

Today, my political scientist and historian selves are seeing a swirling confluence of factors that give hope and possibility at the same time as they warn of problem-avalanching. 

The older, crankier, narrow-minded, visionless, white-privileged, set-in-their-ways gaggle is slowly dying off.  They are, to be sure, a great force to be reckoned with as they go, and they are doing severe damage to democracy and economics as well.  At the moment, that is repairable, albeit at great cost. 

That means the long-term demographics are favorable.  The generations that succeed them have a fair chance, if they can follow their noses, of overturning the plutocratic setup.  Admittedly, it will be, without the catastrophes of Depression and World War, more difficult to accomplish.  Even more so because of the global nature of the plutocrats.  But by no means impossible.   And that’s even with the inevitable transformation of many of the presently younger generations becoming more set in their ways and resistant to change as they get older.

It would be fulfilling a historical pattern as old as the I Ching (Tao Te Ching): “After a time of decay comes the turning point.”

Just as the Gilded Age brought the Progressive Reaction, and the crises that later followed cemented for a generation (albeit quite imperfectly!) the primacy and growth of a middle class, so does the plutocracy/oligarchy dominance of today hold the seeds for a similar response.  Along with the nascent tendencies and desires to resist warring (or at least make it shorter and less continually destructive), as well as foster connections even as we become more tribal, that’s a trend that shows much promise.

Because for economics at least, after a while, the harsh, stark realities become so difficult to ignore, and so many people have so little to lose, that the groundswell propels the democratic levers to function for the people despite all the corruption and obstructionism (assuming, of course, no fascist/authoritarian radical change).

So, assuming we can both halt the acceleration of, and navigate the results from, our environmental criminally destructive foolishness, there is good hope for long-term transformation.  And we will need a vision to run TO, not just a present mess to run away FROM.

The “deep history” and “long history” trends inside just technology and globalization are so favorable that one could postulate that we are in the long view doing great things world-wise.  It is just our WAYS of doing those things are often highly flawed and often off-course.  Correcting those is like turning a great train engine down a better track.  As the obstructionists exit the stage in ever greater numbers, that becomes more and more possible to do.  And THAT’S hopeful.

And here you all thought I was just a cranky doomsayer. :)

And, for those of you who celebrate it, Happy Easter!

This Is Not The World We Can Make

Madame:

Political scientists rarely talk about eventualities, but they do talk about probabilities, and at certain points there become increasing levels of probability.  For example, one could say at a certain point in the 1770s, it was increasingly likely there was going to be a revolution in America.

I have not seen that Matt Damon movie.  I’m guessing it sets off well the economic pressures against the eco and social continuities—and all the human emotions, drives, needs, failings, and temptations therein.

Your story is kudos-inspiring—and a telling demonstration for all people on the value of reading.  To paraphrase Socrates, when one profits in a short amount of time what has taken another a lifetime to acquire, the profit therein (or the “rate of return” in today’s economically-fixated lexicon) is extraordinary.

One of the greatest frustrations of today is the promise.  Never before has there been such PROMISE for civilization.  People the world over WANT to participate in a prosperous world village, want to make a livable wage, and want others to do the same.  The martial desires of ages past are largely gone, and only the failures of leadership, of vision, of resource allocation, of fairness, of good sense, bring forth their flaring. 

We live in a time of such INCREDIBLE possibility.  This world could truly be one of excitement, pride, confidence, and anticipation.  But it is hammerlocked by plutocrat manipulation.  They are much better strategic thinkers, and they use their material advantages to the near-utmost.  And because we let them, because we are easily manipulated by them, the world of awesome possibilities does not unfold, but instead, only this malformed travesty—parts appealing, much unappealing or even self-destructive—is unveiled for us and we are spectacled into accepting it.

We can do better.  We can do SO much better.