What Do You Stand For?

We'll see how my workout sets with my iffy stomach, but, in the meantime, I have earned the right to blog, which is good because I have something to say. And I'm going to do a sort of Thieving Thursday today because today is when I said it.

The Mother, who has a wonderful blog, well worth reading any day, does a special bit on Fridays regarding the history of motherhood, and all the scary tales therein. Today, in honor of Halloween, she talked about the transformation of the Dark Ages' most assiduous medical practitioners (midwives) to witches in the eyes of the powers that were. Now, I could talk about this as some length myself, but I think she's done a better job, certainly more research.

But, it got me to thinking. Western culture prides itself on values we presumably learned from an individual (Christ) some two millenia ago who reputedly embodied all that was kind, patient, forgiving, tolerant, educated, generous and peaceful (not unlike Buddha who came before), and yet... Governments and religious institutions have, over and over, villified kindness, education, compassion, tolerance, science and consensual copulation, and glorified torture, war, greed, ignorance, hatred, fear, and yes, even sexual predation.

That isn't to say most people were evil, just that the powers that be found ways to manipulate the populace into equating all that was evil with good and all that was good with evil - often by citing Christ who was, ironically, often much more like the people being persecuted than those who persecuted in his name. Don't believe me? Take the witch example. Imagine if Christ as he had been described had lived in Germany during the height of the anti-witch hysteria. He was kind. He was a healer. He did obvious magic. He challenged the prevailing wisdom. He was pacifist and tolerant to those who thought differently. I don't see how he wouldn't ended up burned at the stake, and those doing so in the name of all that was holy wouldn't have bothered to wash their hands first.

Ancient history you say? Really, for the past century or so, haven't we done many of the same things? I'm not singling out a religion or a nation, but, as a culture, how often have we revered greed and blind ambition, exalted violence, condoned dishonesty, sneered at tolerance and compassion? We frequently come up with rationales and explanations for calling bad things good. We call it defense, for instance, even if it hasn't been deployed except on foreign soil for literally decades. We accept clear dishonesty and blatant pandering to bribery and call it politics. We restrict people from being recognized for lifetime companions though that's what they are and call it family values. We watch people, through unmitigated greed and deceptive practices, bring a nation to the brink of financial ruin, then reward themselves with billions while taxpayers lose jobs and families lose homes and defend it as capitalism.

I think you get my drift.

My point is that we need to stop worrying about the buzzwords and the stories, what people tell us about what they want us to do and believe. Instead, we must ask ourselves what we really stand for. When we think about an issue or a stance, we need to ask ourselves are we on the side that's really good or are we telling ourselves that? Who are we really hurting? Who are we really helping?

I think, possibly because I'm a dreamer, that, if people really did that, really asked themselves what they stand for and compared it to what they want to stand for, they'd be much much harder to manipulate.

Maybe I'm wrong and people are naturally evil and self-deceiving. I don't think so. I believe that, if they were truly evil, they wouldn't have to deceive themselves.

I know what I want to stand for. Do you?

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A Fascinating Experiment

You know, the past few days I've been talking about the health care issue, what I'd like to do, some of the impediments to having it all work out well. There are a lot of strong emotions on this issue, misconceptions, angst, resentment, ire. Different opinions and discussions are all over the net - these three are from NYT just today.

But I want to change gears a bit and tell you about something else, a different experiment: Tweenbots. Kacie Kinzer made up some little simple robots, simple mechanisms with no clever navigating mechanisms or sophisticated mobility units, just tiny wheels and a cardboard chassis. Also, a sharpie smile and a flag that told a passerby where the robot was intended to go with an appeal for help.

The intent was to see what would happen if these were set free on the mean streets of New York. They were set out far from their destinations, often deliberately pointing the wrong directions or headed for obstacles. Would most be destroyed? Stranded? Ignored? What would people do with an anonymous request for help? Without even a reason for the destination given?

Perhaps you'll be surprised at the results:

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

But I'm not.

There's a lot of ugly in the world. There is. We see it on the news. We hear about the dissension and the arguing and the hatred and the fear. The violence confronts us on our televisions and even in our lives.

But I believe that most people are good, quietly good in an unnewsworthy way. Not that they can't be manipulated or tricked into doing bad things, but it's not what they want to do. If given a chance to do a little something nice, most people will. And be glad to do it. Doing a little something nice makes your own day a little brighter.

So, although I don't know that we'll solve our problems as soon as we'd like, I believe we can and will solve them. Every problem we have, someone has had before. People are good and I think, if we can focus on that instead of what separates us, we'll find out path out.

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Thieving Thursday: Making the World Better

Joel Klebanoff again has provided me a venue to steal a good comment this week. He wrote a blog this week about how cool (but unlikely) it would be if we could all get along, stop warring and treating people with intolerance, stop killing and raping, stop beating up the old lady and kicking puppies (I'm paraphrasing). Then, he noted the terrible unemployment that would result from all those jobs in the army, in the military contractor venue, in crime fighting, etc that would be lost and horror would lay across the land. He meant it all in fun (and I knew it), but, around here, that kind of thinking is considered just short of gospel.

I don't get it.

Yes, military contractors would have to change focii or go out of business. Horse drawn cart builders did, too. And we survived. So did milkmen and ice deliverers and door-to-door brush salesmen. But they did so because the money still gets spent. People scream at the money the government spends BUT it largely goes back into the economy here. That's working against my argument but bear with me. See, let's say we had a balanced budget and a reasonable deficit (pause for uncontrollable laughter). Chances are, the bulk of the money not spent on ugliness, spent to support police and federal prisons and federal courts and FBI and CIA and the military and all the military contractors would be spent another way. Heck, shutting everything down would probably eat a chunk, at least the first year, and that money would be spent on jobs. But what about next year? Same thing. Or it could be spent to support universal health care that would allow more businesses to do their own hiring and would allow regular people to have more money to spend on other things rather than medical care/coverage. The money still goes out into the economy. Or it could be spent on rebuilding architecture. Or putting those technical minds to NASA or inventions or green energy or ...

Given, of course, that we won't be seeing a balanced budget any time soon or a deficit that isn't frightening, if this happened say, tomorrow, it might just go toward debts we're making or have already made. What about that? Well, everything we pay toward the principal is something we don't have to pay toward the interest, don't have to pay back later. Which means, in the long term it will do the same thing, put that money back into the system, our system, for our benefit.

It's really not complicated.

So, for our economic health, we're supposed to buy that war and violence and intolerance and nastiness in general are a small price to pay? This Rocket Scientist calls BS.

What is unfathomable to me is how the US public is brainwashed into thinking we owe whole industries a living. We're supposed to protect the profits of big oil and the auto industry and the military contractors and the...well, you name it.

Take for instance health insurance. Health insurance is screaming that the government can't be trusted to be a middle man between people and the ones that actually do the healing, that cutting out their incredible profits will somehow do the general populace a disservice and leave them paying more for less. Uh. How? The government doesn't have to make a profit. Hell, breaking even would be great. How could those using it not benefit? And, if there were only a one payer system, every doctor would be on it (thereby providing more assurance of choice, not less), but he wouldn't have to pay half his staff to do only filing for insurance because there'd be only one organization to deal with instead of eleventy dozen - so he could instead hire staff that would, I don't know, help people get well instead of shuffle forms.

And health insurance knows this which is why they're busting a gut trying to convince us we don't need a public option along with all of their private options. If government were really going to do such a crappy job, they'd be pushing for it. But, since they live and die by profit, they will lose in a head to head every time. Good riddance as far as I'm concerned. I have no sympathy for any company that profits on the pain and suffering of others. Maybe they can do something useful now. Or work for the government.

Of course, no one does this like big oil. "You need to keep buying oil and forgo those useless green technologies because they're too expensive." Oil is indeed cheaper. Today. Investing and more research can change that, though not necessarily overnight. However, conservation today saves the consumer money, no matter what oil costs (or green energy sources too, for that matter). And having solar or wind power available does the consumer only good. Every drop of oil they don't spend not only makes the world a better place, but also keeps further off the day when unavoidable skyrocketing oil prices sky high. It also limits our need to poke our noses where it doesn't belong militarily to protect our oil interests.

That, of course, brings us back to war. Shouldn't we be smart enough to know better by now? I've used this quote before but I think it fits perfectly.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
-Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953, a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors

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