Response on FB to comments in my last post:
Stephen, I agree with almost all your observations with one exception. There are answers and ways forward if we choose to live the life we strive for. We must turn our ideas into practice. It’s no longer sufficient to discuss what’s wrong. Each one of us that see a better way to organize a society, has to do something to move our country and world in that direction during the short time we are on this planet and not in it. I think it starts with thinking and acting with the collective good as the goal. With our cultural lean toward individualism, we are seeing the commons diminished and degraded. We, as a people, have lost the ability to recognize our connection to all life on this planet. The spiritual oneness is lacking and hard to find.
My Response:
Stephen Lafer I do say by the end that when things are/seem impossible that is not reason to stop looking for ways to make the impossible the new possible. The task ahead is not about guns and school murders in mass. It is about a society in which the political system has come to be fashioned so that such things are allowable, even regularized as have been other forms of violence and bad behavior-war, fraud, incredible wealth for some and very little for some others and the resulting forms of poverty, use of wealth to gain political power over others in a nation that is supposed to be a democratic one, jobs that pay too little, rip-off advertising, rip-off leaders, and so on and a population not so well educated as to know what is wrong and even less about what to do to make things better. The solutions to underlying problems, the means for bringing about meaningful change have much, I think, to do with building educational programs dedicated to helping Americans to know how to think for themselves, to desire to study well enough what is going around them and what is affecting them directly so they know what to do something about and so they know what to do about it. That is a most difficult task, seemingly impossible but doable if there is the will to really shake things up. In that shake-up, of course, all will have to give up something but, if they do, it is very possible they will get something better, a smart country dedicated to the humane treatment of all.