Me, Politics, and Society.

The following is a jornal entryof sorts that I wrote in 2006:


Every since I was a child I have felt that I am meant for greatness. I cannot say exactly what but I know that I am not alone in that feeling. Most children have great aspirations; they see a future bright with possibility. As I have aged I have held to the notion that there is something great ahead of me.
I am not suggesting that I am completely disappointed with my early adult life. I am a father of three wonderful boys and the husband of a woman I hardly deserve. I believe that being a father and a husband are opportunities for greatness in and of themselves; responsibilities I hope I fulfill half as well as my own father has and does.
With age however the brightness of that hope tends to dim. Why is that? Many would say that the dimmer switch on life is the reality of the real world. In other words, childhood naïveté. While I'm not going to deny that some of our childhood aspirations were perhaps a bit lofty, a bit uninformed, I take issue with the idea that childhood's line of thinking is all wrong.
Personally I think that as a culture and a society we do a bang-up job of quelling the stirrings of youth. I hear the voices all around me, coming from every direction. Some of the voices are systematic and deliberate. Others are ingrained in us as a society and as individuals. Perhaps the most pervasive and systematic are the results of industrial psychology and corporate econo-babble. Other voices, just as powerful, come from a long and ingrained history of what I'll call class system predestination (I trust you understand what I mean by that). The media drops whispering altogether and yells at each of us at every turn. All of the aforementioned voices rapidly accentuate and drive the battle of the whisperings within. Self doubt is a powerful crippling agent.
I fear that I have become somewhat cynical and jaded in recent years. Once again there are those who would simply reply "life will do that to you." This pessimism is something I find myself battling more often then I am comfortable with. I cannot shake the somewhat romantic notion of grandeur in my future, no matter the heavy doses of reality checks.
I believe that a few of the key ingredients to my cynicism lye with those political leaders in our world, our countries and our communities. Currently (October 28, 2006) the media outlets around the United States are rancid with political banter. In my own state (Missouri) there is a heated race for U.S. Senate between Democrat Claire McCaskill and the incumbent Republican Jim Talent.
Both candidates and parties are attempting to persuade me to vote for them by telling me how terrible a person their opponent is. We all know the negative ads, and I understand the psychology of the negative ad campaign. Talk about inspiring confidence. And they wonder about the disconnect between politicians and the public they serve. No! They don’t wonder! They have to know. So I ask; do they care?
I want to vote, I really do. So as happens far too often it becomes a case of who is the lesser of two evils. I mean I don’t personally know the people, all I have to go on is what I catch in the media and we know that’s a lot of help (worthless degenerate waste of money).
There is part of me that would like to be President of the United States some day. But the probabilities are against me, and though I will not give up hope, I imagine that now is as good a time as any to begin introducing some of my thoughts to the world. Honestly, my thoughts are the kind that more than likely will bar me from any real opportunity to pursue much of a political career. I cannot see myself forsaking these thoughts however. The fact is that the answers to most of our political, social, and economic woes do not contain complex strategies or new theories. The answers have been around for some time, we as a society just do not want to hear them.
The solutions to the woes of American Society lie with the American People. In particular the lower and middle class Americans who have long since relinquished the majority of what power we once had. The vast majority of the population of the United States feels essentially powerless to effect change of any real substance. Not only is this not true, but this is exactly what the vast minority (those who wield the power) wants us to think. We have positioned ourselves as victims, and if we want real change we are going to have to do two things that most of us want nothing of, sacrifice and become actively united.
Any general sociology class will introduce you to history and current state of western social structure. I took an interesting course in college called "Class, Status, & Power" that offered a particularly eye opening look at who has the influence and why. Sadly much of it can be boiled down to the lower and middle classes never being able to come together and fight for a cause, weather the storm and then remain unified. Many people do not have any ambitions of grandeur and that’s fine. Those people become satisfied after even the smallest and most temporary of victories. In their satisfaction they become comfortable and lax. The problem is that they quit fighting and they begin to lose ground. The vast minority is not ever going to quit fighting for wealth, power, and influence.
We as an American People are gluttons. We feel like we are entitled to a way of life that is virtually impossible to sustain. We expect to have three bedrooms, two baths, a big screen (preferably hi-def) a two car garage (likely full of junk) who knows how many cars in the driveway, central air conditioning, jetted tubs, a stocked fridge and freezer (maybe an extra pair in the garage or basement), a barbeque grill on the deck out back, and I haven't even touched the toys and activities we pursue. Now don't get angry with me. I'm not suggesting I'm any different, but I'm trying to be. If you don’t have it, you want it and you're going to complain about it. If you have it you want more and you're complaining about it. And if whatever you have or don’t have is hard enough to maintain, I can guarantee that you're complaining about it too. I'm guilty too!
Practically always it is a story about the big man keeping the little man down. Now that story may partially be true, how could anyone refute that (of course the big man attempts to in his own condescending way)? But the more powerful part of that story is the implication that we are all powerless victims. Of course everyone has the answers, we all been guilty and we've all heard the talk, but where's the action. We are great at talking the talk but terrible at walking the walk. I have always envisioned myself as being part of the solution rather than perpetuating the problem. I too however have long been another talker. Now this talker turned writer is attempting begin a change within myself that hopefully I can model for and with others. I realize that I cannot change things on my own. But wouldn’t it be great to be part of a cultural revolution the world is waiting for.
We live in a country that is as individual as they come. We celebrate our individuality. But there is a fine line between the self reliance we profess to seek and the ignorant pride we too often possess. We seek exclusivity; we insulate our lives with the walls of our homes, privacy fences, Toyota Camry's and Ford F-150s. All the technology we have to expand our ability to communicate and to reach out and instead we are reaching further in. Our social circles are shrinking instead of expanding. We isolate ourselves because we tell ourselves that we don’t have the time or resources for others.
We serve ourselves first and if we are feeling charitable, we might throw some of our scraps to those in need. But in that wonderful tradition of isolation we give in the way we know best, monetarily. We don’t have the time or the energy to serve, and I say we really don’t care to. It's much easier to sign a check and put it in the mail. This way we can reserve our time, our energy, and maintain our emotional distance all while allowing individuals and governments to clear their consciences
I love cars. I'm not alone, but I really love cars. I have spent far too much time reading about torque, horsepower, understeer/oversteer, fit and finish and visiting car lots to smell the new upholstery I cannot afford. We love our cars; we just cannot give them up. The automobile is a perfect example of American individuality. Every morning and evening on the way to and from work the scene remains the same, rows of vehicles with a diver and rarely a passenger but virtually always plenty of available seats. We as Americans consume 40% of the worlds available oil supply even though we represent only 4.3% of the world's population. Likewise we are the largest contributor to green house gases. By percentage we share the largest burden in the destruction of the ozone but we want cheaper gas and bigger trucks to burn it in.
Of course that's not to mention the stress that we put on the environment in a plethora of other ways. The amount of electricity that we consume is amazing, and all that energy has to come from somewhere. Most all of it comes from burning fossil fuels, and some comes from nuclear sources, but far too little comes from clean, renewable energy sources.
But we want stuff cheap, and I'd argue that that desire for cheap products is driving the country into a hole we may not be able to dig ourselves out of. We don't want to pay a fair price for anything. Even what we consider fair is far from it. If we don’t want to pay a fair price, how can we in turn expect to receive a fair wage? Mexicans are coming across the border to work the jobs that Americans don’t want? It's not that Americans don’t want the jobs, it's that Americans cannot live on the wages that other Americans are willing to pay for those jobs, and the list of "those jobs" continues to grow. Other countries will work cheaper in labor and technology and they'll do it with no benefits and less safety measures in place. But don’t be angry with them, you would gladly take the work as well if you were in their position. But you're not; not yet anyway. How bad does it have to get for us to wake up?
There was a saying that I heard while I lived in Central America. There in the middle of the Latin world, in the country of Honduras, I often heard the following baseball analogy "Americans are born on third base, but they all think they have hit a triple." Neither I nor the Hondurans who mentioned this phrase to me believe that it is true for every American. But I do believe it is a fairly accurate assessment of the psyche of far too many Americans. There is a tendency to believe, or a desire to believe, that we are essentially better people; that we are in some way superior to those of the rest of the world. We must be more intelligent, harder working, more pious, somehow more deserving. But how often do we recognize that we have long been the beneficiary of a system that was fought for and established by previous generations. And that we are the beneficiaries of the very people that we look down upon. We reap the physical resources and the sweat equity of their nations while they are left with the scraps.
Of course those feelings are not reserved to those outside our country; we maintain plenty of similar emotion for our neighbors. We begin in grade school. What are parents have not already taught us, we teach one another. We separate one another, we find ways to differentiate, and we develop hierarchies where none existed. Social psychologists dedicate mush time to understanding the phenomenon. It boils down to elaborate means we devise as ways of protecting our fragile egos. Is it natural, or is it learned? That’s another timeless argument in and of itself, but likely it is both. The important question however is, must it remain that way, can we learn to get past it, and to what degree?
Why are our public schools bad? Are our schools so bad? Will throwing money into the system fix the schools? Will fixing the schools noticeably improve our education? What are the common threads between successful schools? How do we define successful schools? Studies have suggested that the schools and systems themselves relatively little compared to the desire of the student and the support the student has outside the campus. Chicago was the first large public school system to offer students the opportunity to enter a lottery system to attend the better schools. Many students enter the lottery to get into these schools but only a fraction was selected and able to attend. When Steven Levitt analyzed years of the Chicago schools systems records he came up with some interesting findings. Throughout the school systems in general the students who applied for the lottery did well verses those who did not apply for the lottery. The students who "won" the lottery and attended the "better" schools did not however do significantly better than the students who had applied for the lottery but had "lost."