Changes coming down...

I don't really believe in the end of the world anymore, but I'm not sure what direction my blogging should take from here. I need to consider my options for awhile. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for playing!

Liberal, not Communist

      Being a Liberal, and therefore on the left side of the aisle in terms of politics, there are people who automatically assume I am a fan of Communism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

      The problem with Communism, in my opinion, is that it is all about the revolution – why you should have one, how it should be organized, and who to blame for it being necessary. It has shown very little application in following up on creating a working government after the revolution. In fact, it has a record of putting some truly awful people in charge, who proceed to take dictatorial powers almost immediately. There is no working plan to create checks and balances, no plan to install accountability, no system of effective governance at all. It is a beautiful-sounding ideology that can be used to describe society and culture from a particular viewpoint, but sucks as a system of government.

      There are some nations, most notably in northern Europe, that have taken the concepts of socialism and applied them to their existing democratic governments over time. No revolution required, which means no massive reworking of infrastructure. Keeping the checks and balances while making the system more people-friendly. It works for them, and they seem to be thriving even in this disastrous economy.

      It is a mash-up of ideologies, a mixing of high-minded concepts with practical solutions, that seems to be the winning scenario. Free-Market Capitalism is proving to be as much of a disaster as straight Communism, and for much the same reasons. Any pure ideology is going to be antagonistic to compromise, which is essential to getting things done in politics.

      I don’t want a revolution. I just want a government that is more people-friendly. I don’t care if the rich get richer, I just don’t see why the richest nation on Earth should have any poverty at all. If we have so much wealth, why are there still poor people? When we give poor people money, they spend it on the essentials of life, which means they are contributing to economic growth. A thriving economy will have more jobs, and nobody likes to live on welfare forever. Educational opportunities also should be available for everyone, in order to further enrich the economy. We also need to take care of our sick and injured so they can be productive again instead of languishing in debt or filing for bankruptcy.

      All of this can be done with no changes to the Constitution at all. Everything still in place – all the checks and balances, all the infrastructure, all the legal protections of citizens remains intact. Some laws would be changed, but mostly it is just a matter of enforcing what is already there. Separation of money from politics needs stronger enforcement to reduce corruption, and taxation rates need to stop coddling the wealthy. Medicare can be expanded to become a single-payer system, which is not that big of a step from where it is now. The student loan system can be replaced with a system of grants without changing the qualifications. Reducing the size of our military can be done easily as soon as we stop trying to be the world’s police force. Do we still need so many bases in Germany? Are nuclear missile submarines still necessary? If you want to trim the budget, that’s where you should start, not cutting food stamps and welfare checks from single mothers.

      None of this requires a revolution. It just requires a change of attitude. We need to stop being so “every man for himself” and start being more “he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”

Town Mouse and Country Mouse

The disparity between urban and rural has been around since the beginning of civilization. Greek slave Aesop wrote about the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse between 620 and 560 BCE, suggesting that the distinction was already familiar even then. The world of the city is a very different place than living in the country, and people generally have a preference for one or the other. Rural people are more independent and self-reliant, accustomed to taking care of themselves and having a small number of neighbors. Urbanites enjoy the benefits of public services like police protection, fire fighters, paved roads, clean water, education, and hospitals; as well as convenient access to a large variety of goods and entertainment. More importantly, the higher pay of manufacturing jobs has traditionally made urban living more opulent than subsistence farming could provide. In spite of having a large number of neighbors, however, urbanites are typically less likely to have as many friends as their country cousins, though the constant association with a diverse population does make them more open to people unlike themselves.
The gap between urban and rural lifestyles has been getting wider throughout the industrial age, and shows signs of becoming much, much worse in the information age. Living in the country now means less access to internet and cell phone services, though satellites are bridging that gap – if you have the money. Increasingly, people who have the money to stay connected are moving to country estates for the privacy that country living affords them. Away from the cameras and surveillance that have become the new normal for city dwellers. The suburbs are no longer enough to get away from the problems of urban living, and even small towns are becoming increasingly urbanized.
In America, as with every industrialized nation in the twenty-first century, to live in the city means to surrender your anonymity. You are public. What secrets you have are becoming harder and harder to protect. There are advantages to the encroaching surveillance and intrusion – crime rates are down in places that have security cameras installed. We trade our freedom for security, which is becoming an easier pill to swallow as our lives become increasingly padded with technology. A cell phone with built-in video camera is a powerful weapon on the city streets, protection from police corruption and insurance investigators as well as the odd mugger or rapist. Better, in many respects, than a gun, which has its own hazards in this environment. Many city dwellers own firearms in the USA, but the situations where a gun is an advantage is unbalanced by even more situations where just having a gun will get you in trouble. Extreme care must be used when drawing a gun in a city, and poor judgment can cost innocent lives.
Living independently in deep rural environments means doing without most of the technological comforts or lack of privacy. You are responsible for your own security, which probably consists of a combination of dogs and guns and fences. Your security makes you more isolated from your neighbors, but the people you do meet are very likely to have similar ideas about such things – as well as similar tastes in music, religion, and politics. Education is harder to get, but also carries less of an advantage. Life is simpler – much simpler. It is easy to reduce complex issues to their most basic terms – everything is black-and-white. Freedom is paramount, because that’s really the only advantage you have over the city dweller.
This is the dividing factor in American politics right now – town mouse versus country mouse. Urban liberals against rural conservatives. In the long run, the numbers of the rural population will dwindle until they no longer represent a political force to be reckoned with, while the increased educational benefits of urban living will create a more diverse variety of liberals. In the meantime, the dying conservative movement is thrashing in impotent rage – their simplistic ideology still a powerful tool of the sociopathic industrialists. Things will get worse before they get better, but they will get better.
There is a new breed of rural dweller. More connected, less isolated, better educated. More open minded than the stodgy conservatives of a simpler time. Still fond of freedom, dogs, and guns – but also more open to new ideas. These people put up solar panels and/or windmills to improve their self-sufficiency. They recycle, and practice sustainable farming practices. They surf the ‘net and watch TV on a satellite service. Most importantly, less likely to be a tool for Big Business and evangelical grifters. This is the new country mouse. Not so different than the town mouse anymore, but still not exactly the same. City and country will always be different worlds, but as we continue to evolve into the twenty-second century, we will find that our differences are less important than our commonalities.
We are all human, and that is what binds us. No environment can change us so much that we lose that bond. We are too much alike to let small differences divide us, and the sooner we all learn that, the better our lives will be.

Amazing

Grasp the top of your head with both hands. Beneath that thin sheath of scalp and brittle shell of cranium is your cerebrum. That part of your brain where thoughts reside. Smaller than a basketball. More complex than a supercomputer. That is you. Or, at least, the part of you that is processing the information contained in this sentence. That little pinpoint of self-awareness that realizes that this is about YOU, and not your hamster, is swimming around within that semi-spherical object beneath your fingers.

Amazing, isn't it?

The organ of thought is not perfect, and anything so incredibly complicated is prone to malfunction on occasion. But, honestly, how can you tell? Sure, you have made mistakes in the past. Who hasn't? But right now, this very second, you are in complete control and are fully rational. Really? How do you know? If the very instrument you use to judge your rationality is, itself, irrational, how do you judge how rational you are? You can't. It is impossible.

But, having said that, you know how easy it is to tell when other people are being irrational. Have you ever tried to tell someone they are behaving irrationally? If so, have they ever believed you? That would require a huge amount of trust on their part, or a great deal of credibility on your part. I can tell you that any time I have ever said, “You are behaving irrationally,” to anyone, regardless of how intoxicated or insane that person was, they denied it, and became very insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.

So, if you were insane, how would you know? I'm not talking about the legal definition of insanity, but, let's say, a slightly biased and incomplete understanding of reality.

We are, at best, the centers of our own unique universes. Think about that for a minute. A universe inside that jelly-like mass of neurons inside your skull. At least a model of a universe. An imperfect model of as much of a universe as you can think of or imagine. Still, that is amazing.

Every child that is born is the creation of a new universe. A new viewpoint, perspective and personality. One that has never been seen before, nor will be duplicated any time thereafter.

For every person that dies, a universe falls. Not just the accumulation of knowledge, experience and wisdom that is unique to each one of us, but that individual viewpoint, perspective and personality. Gone forever.

Are we any less significant because there are about seven billion of us? Seven billion unique individuals. Seven billion universes. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

Maybe we are all crazy to some degree. Some days I'm amazed that we can all manage to get through the day without wandering into traffic or bouncing off each other on the sidewalk. We manage, somehow, most of the time, to get things done. Sometimes we do really well. Every once in a while we do something terrific. When that happens, every one of us benefits.

We are amazing, indeed.