Enemy of The State of Chaos

Editorial Note:

I original started this post in early 2011.  After years of philosophical gnashing of teeth, I decided to "put to paper" what I see in America what I didn't see as working, destructive in the long term.  After completing the initial draft of this posts, I decided that each of the 30 problems that America and the world faces deserved more than a paragraph or two and I started to break each problem into a separate articles. 

I found that posting a problem is not so useful alone; those then being only complaints and thus of little long term value.  So I decided to post some solutions as well.  I thought that rather pompous of me to propose solving the world's problems and this put a bit of hesitancy in my desire to publish.  Likewise, I wanted something easy, if not slightly uncomfortable, to mentally digest.  I set out the structure for the article but it does have some inconsistencies which I didn't fully resolve.

Then life intervened and all work was left in my draft bucket for almost two years.

Sparked to review and express myself again, I reread this post.  I find in them distinct traces of both global problems but also personal disappointments I am still experiencing, unresolved.

Less in the vain of personal resolution, I post this blog with minor corrections (and warts) more to be someone that stands for family, America, our world and your species.  I fear I may be alone in my stand that humanity has a future and it doesn't have to be an "apocalyptic" one.

Jan. 2011:

In response to a concerning question amongst friends, I brought together a list (roughly ascending order) of problems America (and the world as a whole,) increasingly face every day.

This list is pretty long but we, as Americans and as human beings in this world, have been quietly ignore these problems for too long. The longer a person or group of people ignore a problem, the worse the problem becomes. A single problem often becomes two or more problems when left untended and occasionally dominos out of control. All these problems have a few common, "core" sources. However, a discussion at that philosophical and abstract level would take too long, be tedious for the prevailing short-term thinkers and would not allow for immediately answers the questions "what's wrong and how do we fix it." 

Yes, I am catering to your short attention spans.

I don't pull in any punches in my list (or, if I do, I am unaware of it - I am working on being more assertive, bare with me.) I am fairly certain that I will offend some readers (not by patently offensive, personal attacks but definitely from "this is a problem" aspect.)

I believe, as set of interlocking human cultures, we can do better and it is our individual responsibilities to discuss, understand and solve all these problems and prevent new problems. In this respect, you are either for fixing the world or you are for letting the chaos continue is unchecked rule.

I encourage you discuss these problems and/or other problems with family, friends and people in your community, make decisions based on contemplation, consideration and meditation. Then, take actions what fit within the concepts of "right", "works", "positive", "respectful" and "future-oriented."  In short, take what thoughts you have from reading here into the world for discussion as comments, complaints and/or condemnations here do not serve anyone.

Disclaimer: If you are a sensitive type, easily outraged or prone to weeping, mentally unstable, pregnant or nursing, younger than 17 or older than 90, on heart medication or mood-altering drugs, please don't continue reading. When are feeling better, get older or younger, wiser and/or can tolerate a list of potentially stinging barbs, you are welcome to come back and try again.


Top list of things wrong on planet Earth

1. Problem: Living inside, sitting, not moving, not experiencing "in real life", getting tired, fat, lazy and ignorant.
• A solution: Movement, such as exercise or just going for a walk, changes blood pressure and increases cognitive abilities.
2. Problem: Group arrogance, where the group may be a country, state, city or other community.
• A solution: communication with all of your local and national communities, even with those groups that you don't think you can agree with. Of course you don't have to agree with everything you hear but you should be open the possibility you are wrong as well as the possibility you are right.
3. Problem: Failure to education everyone the differences between "need and want".
• A solution: starts in childhood, should be reinforced in all educational systems and must be removed for media advertising in all media formats.
4. Problem: "Money equals success" obsession and misconception.
• A solution: this systemic problem requires systemic solution, starting in education all the way through public life. It will require bold leadership from government, wealthy but primarily must be reinforced in the middle and lower classes in the families. True success comes before money, if money is involved at all.
5. Problem: Worship of teen and young adults to the point of danger.
• A solution: sex and sexuality are the strongest human drives in our active years. Media exposes us to wave after wave of attractive, young and healthy people. Reality, because of other problems on the list, leaves the rest of our population overweight and deemed unattractive. Media picks up on this and reinforces youth-only as beauty. This cycle can easy confuse a developing mind and, at the same time because does not communicate effectively and honestly about sexuality, sexual thoughts can become increasingly unbound by any social or cultural constraints. In the mainstream, this leads to idol worship.  In the non-mainstreams it can lead to predatory, sexual deviants. Sexually unexpressed and undiscussed can turn into violence and broadcasting youth-only messages is kindling to the fire.
• Note: hasn't anyone else wondered where all these pedophiles and child murders are coming from? We have been growing them, training/force-feeding them at home via TV and Internet and allowing them to develop to a crisis point.
6. Problem: "Beauty, fame and sex equals success" obsession and misconception.
• A solution: this systemic problem requires systemic solution, starting in education all the way through public life. It will require bold leadership from government but the primary responsibility lays with the middle and lower classes families. Beauty is purely marketing aspect and should hold diminished value against other, tangible measures of the value of a human being. (Seeking and maintaining) Fame is narcissism and should be treated as such. Sex is a mistreated subject in organized religion when leads to dysfunctional cultures and national laws; religion needs to join the twenty-first century and leave the asserts from two-to-three thousand years ago to be only history.
7. Problem: Being taught by media, politics and educational institutions to think in short, shallow, "quick and dirty", "feel good only" terms instead of critical, long term thinking.
• A solution: this is a systemic problem with corporations seeking to create product, brand and company loyalty by diminished critical thought by using increasingly short advertising campaigns, bursts of information, sponsoring production of media shows with low value and values. Because this is pervasive and even viral in nature, it re-infests education, media, government and public life. The solution is to remove the unchecked, unregulated privileges of corporations and re-institute full educational systems and eliminate the limiting, corporate-education provided in public schools.
8. Problem: "Greed Is Good" as a way of living allows for any number of immoral behaviors to obtain those marks of success.
• A solution: remove the ability of the wealthy, super wealthy and government leaders to provide resources to circumvent legal processes. This will lead to sanctions which can true affect behavior changes in these individuals. All prosecution of high level court cases involved greed and corporations should be broadcast. While financial deterrents should work, the lose of privacy in these matters is often more effective.
9. Problem: "Necessary War" is acceptable, when in fact, its just murder on a larger scale.
• A solution: out law war globally. Any armed acts of aggression will be called murder.
• Rant: Would we as a country (America) be hurting and suffering (from job loss and historic debt that the next 3 or more generations will pay on unless the Chinese buy our country) if we has skipped invading, occupying and "rebuilding" two middle-eastern countries? Do 19 hijackers provide sufficient excuse to commit warfare on 61 million people in two countries, to drain the state funds to drive a immoral war of greed and revenge? Seems like either overkill, misdirection, greed, war-mongering or all of the above. Next time you see a homeless American family, a starving American child or a college student prostituting to make tuition, thank them for their selfless scarifies so we could bomb a second and third-world countries back into the stone age.
10. Problem: Getting on the television news at any cost so you can feel important and successful.
• A solution: media broadcasters should be charged a significant licensing fee to showing "insignificant stories of stupidity for the expressed purposes of fame and/or culturally or philosophically damaging stories without editorial comment nor viewer guidance."
11. Problem: Absents of good nutritional options
• A solution: plant a victory garden: victory over corporate immorality and greed, victory over irresponsible governments, victory over stupidity, victory over history, victory over health problems causes by questionable, dubious and shameful "food" preparation companies.
12. Problem: Breaking of family ties by an overworking culture.
• A solution: limit the amount of time all American employees are allowed work to 30 hours a week, extend vacations an additional week or two per year from the start and bring back family vacations as a much anticipated national past time and re-institute the family dinner every day at a fixed, known time without TV, tablets or smart phones. Conversation builds and maintains families.
13. Problem: The Corporate Immorality where a corporation as the Rights of a Citizen but has no moral obligation of "right and wrong". So, corporations regularly break the law, gambling they won't be caught or, if caught, are "fined" which do not have enough force to affect behavior changes in the corporation. Corporations then trains it's employees (by leadership) and the public (by it's misdeeds) that "right and wrong" are useless ideas that do not apply if you are large, successful and a incorporated.
• A solution: A corporation is a non-citizen entity consisting of collection of people to accomplish a task or task(s). As such, this collection of people should also be provide a checks-and-balances system within the corporation.  Thus, if a criminal activity occurs all of held directly responsible via active, indifferent or neglect of duties. As such, we must redefine and downsize the privileges of non-citizenship entities; remove all ties to any and all political and governmental agencies unless specified by contract; have company owner, the executive staff, board of directories and principle stock holders directly responsible for all criminal actions.  Lastly, add government liquidation of corporations (not take over) as a penalty for criminal activity.
14. Problem: Mental and emotional exhaustion in parents manifested as uncaring to their children. It is then carried forth as uncaring (not exhaustion) into the next generation which is then ready, willing and able to commit any action to sever it's own desires.
• A solution: same solution as #11 but requires most if not all these solutions or solutions like them to make life a little less complicated and allow daily space to "determine, create, refine and enjoy" being family.
15. Problem: The recurring emotional and support isolation of significant portions of the populations, particularly in times of crisis.
• Question: how many office-place mass murders could have been prevented by a having a network of support (in and out of the office) to head off the problem well before someone shows up in the office with a weapon?
• Question: how many disturbed people with access to weapons and munitions would have been prevent from reaching a point of desperation in random public place if their communities had provided regular greetings, conversation and sustained interaction?
• Question: how many child murdered by parents could have been prevented by having a network of support to head off the problem before it reached a funeral?
• Question: how many child and young people would have not been murdered if we have kept better track of their location and who their friends were and who their parents and what the focus of the relationships were for all involved?
• Question: how many people would be alive today if we had a better respect for all primary human drives (gender identification, emotional attraction and sex) and stopped legislating, criminalizing, ostracizing, castigating and fearing those with different variations of primary human drives?
• Question: how many school children would still be alive today if they had parents regularly engaged in them in conversation, guidance, support and education (and turned the TVs, computers, music players, game consoles, and cell phones off) and had safe interactive family time?
• A solution: simple, reoccurring communication: daily exercise of social skills within the family, within the neighborhood, with strangers and (as often as possible) within the city, state and nation and within different countries around the world.
16. Problem: Poisonous "workarounds" for exhausting including illegal drug use, legal drug abuse, and social accepted abuses of chemicals that affect behavior, mood and depression.
• A solution: allows for the creation of a space to relax. This requires a significant portion of these solutions or similar to be implemented. It will also require identifying the unpublished chemicals that affect mood, behavior and depression. Those I know of first-hand are: caffeine, HFCS [High-fructose Corn Syrup] and other types of sugar (in almost all manufactured foods and a fair amount of dining-out meals) and unregulated "energy drinks".
• Note: If should be observed that these workarounds for exhausting are the same as the workarounds for not loving life and usually end up causing increased exhaustion.
17. Problem: Not enough jobs.
• A solution: In America, the working middle class creating economic stability. The American government can't create jobs; it can only provide incentives to business to the private sector. The private sector creates, destroys or exports jobs. The private sector is owned by the wealthy. In times of financial crisis, the wealthy historically destroy jobs, sit on their money doing nothing until things improve, taking government money if they can arrange it. This is how they get and stay wealthy: doing very little to help the poor and working middle classes which, in a crisis, prolongs the hardships borne by all. In America, the working middle class creates economic stability.  The wealthy coroporations need to return the core industries shipped outside the country, retrain and retool America to be a producer of goods, not a only a consumer of goods.
18. Problem: Americans obsession with murder, serial killers, "solve the murder mystery/puzzle" and "sexual offenders" in every aspect of life in every possible media outlet.
• A solution: we need to get some outside hobbies because this obsession is only breeding more murders, serial killers and sex offenders. We need to stop glorifing dangerous and mentally ill people in our culture and celebrate the positive achievements (aka "successes") of our culture and species. What would the local and national news look like if we stopped glorifying murders?
• Note: This also applies directly to the glorification of warfare and "necessary wars".
19. Problem: The escapist mentality into religion that "god/Allah/Budha will save me if I pray enough" instead of taking personal responsibility and personal action to correct the state of local, national and global affairs.
• A solution: stop believing in historical fairytales, at least long enough to help clean up the mess that "wishing a problem away" (instead of participating in it's solution) has caused. If I am hurt, don't pray for me - assist me. If my neighbor is without shelter, don't pray for him - house him. If a foreigner is hungry, don't pray for them - bring them food, water and seeds. Prayer alone does not fix anything in this world - only action can.
20. Problem: Reinforcing lowest-common denominator standards in education, cyclically resulting in the rise of truly stupid people (contrast "stupid" with "ignorant") as a powerful majority, rather than a silent minority.
• A solution: this systemic problem requires systemic solution, classes sizes should be limited to 15 students.  Additionally we all have to change how we view teachers which, today, is not as educators, but as state-provided baby sitters for the benefit of the overworked American family. Educational requirements include parents, community and teachers to work together but our modern culture keeps them working against each other, fighting over time. Removing the time and emotional stresses on families opens up the possibility that teachers will be able to return to teaching; that school can remove metal detectors, barred windows and razor wire because those are meant for prisons, not educational institutions. Regular teachers need to be freed from "no child left behind" to allow students with higher potential to be expressive, and allow average performing students to experience their success as encouragement. Those with diminish abilities (diminish family situations) should be focused in specific, structured course work to identify and correct the problems preventing a child from reaching their potential. Smart children told to wait for everyone else to catch up become restless and eventually act out. Children with diminished interest act out to distract from academic achievements. Both sets of disgruntled students prevent all students from achieving. These are two different problems sets and asking one educator to handle 40+ students with a mixture of these problems, inadequate resource, inadequate wagers just can not work.
• Note: Behaving stupidly not something to ever be proud. Living stupidly should never gain you any extra privileges.  Being wealthy and stupid shouldn't be glorified.
21. Problem: Religious Righteousness coupled with sheer ignorance of the true, historic roots of each religion, and the ignorant posturing of "my god against your god" to the point of violence.
• A solution: legally, include "religious expression" as a modifier to violence action if it is shown to be the primary or secondary motivation for the crime, the same as any other hate crime, doubling the fines, fees and punishment. Hate, especially driving by self-deluded righteousness, has no place in twenty-first century American. Truth, Tolerate and Acceptances are the only options.
• Note: If you really want to follow your chosen religion, you must become a religious scholar and study the history of your religion back to it's original, true inception and understand the historical context from which your religion sprang from. Anything less is just you being lazy and choosing stupidity and to be easily lead by a "spiritual leader."
22. Problem: Living in "the violence of human history" rather than "the potential of the human future."
• A solution: same as solution #8 but also requires the return of context when discussing history. Wars are fought for only two reasons: hatred and greed. Of hatred, it is always because of history of the people involved: revenge. Of greed, not matter how masked the excuses, it is always known to be greed. And Greed Is Bad.
23. Problem: The return of "Might Makes Right" as a globally and culturally-damaging philosophy.
• A solution: When a government shows its self as a bully in the world theater, its citizens think its okay to bully each other too. Solving some or most of the other issues will diminish this "little boy behavior" and allow it to be removed from our collective cultures.
24. Problem: Corporate leaders, media spokespeople and politicians who think that because they have money, beauty, fame and sex, they can say and do whatever they wish because they are "successful."
• A solution: this is an extension of several problems in this lists and solutions for some of most will diminish this dictatorial character flaw. Judicial accountability should be strengthened, fines and punishments increased when the culprit shows habitual disregards for law because of wealth or success. The wealthy and successful should spend more time, not less time in prison when they knowingly, willingly and repeated demonstrate they do not feel the law applies to them. Immediate insolvency should be a punishment for the criminal wealthy.
• Note: It is pure illusion that, with enough wealth and success, nothing you do is wrong. Wrong is always wrong, not matter who commits the action.
25. Problem: "Protest" by stone and stick.
• A solution: This isn't protest; its fear and anger. Riots by stick and stone always ends with weapon discharge, fire and death. True protest requires communication.
26. Problem: "Protest" against your government.
• A solution: if you don't have solutions to the problems you are demonstrating against in your hands and ready to implement, you are only participating in civil unrest. If you can only complain, you aren't qualified to protest. Stay home. Chanting anti-government slogans while looting stores, burning building, shooting people is not protest; it's criminal activity against your nation, not against your government.
  
27. Problem: "Protest" by murder/suicide.
• A solution: this isn't protest; it's only selfishness and should not be praised, revered, celebrated, excused or covered in any electronic or print media ever. If you are contemplating this action, seek some counseling immediately.  If you can't be counseling, then just get too drunk to move.  What ever you do, know that everything will be ok; let the crisis pass.  For those who would be commit murder/suiciders, if there is a Hell, you are going there to burn, forever.
28. Problem: "Protest" by explosives.
• A solution: this isn't protest. Because of your poverty and/or ignorance, you have been misguided or tricked into this situation by someone with an agenda you are not part of. They are not working for your best interested and there is no reward after you detonate the explosive. There is nothing for you to gain from this. Return the suicide vest to "your controller" and, optionally, detonate it there.
29. Problem: "Protest" by terrorism
• A solution: this isn't protest. It's revenge, base, raw, unproductive revenge and fear mongering. I know of no religions which "sanctions "revenge as godly" nor instilling "fear as a virtue from god." Stop and go home to your family, community and country and live a quiet life.
30. Problem: Silence.
• A solution: too many truly good spirited, good willed, well meaning, "morally upright", good people sit idly by and let the evil things happen "around them." How dare we be "shocked and mortified" when something evil finally befalls "one of the good people?!"  We have a responsibility to the human species to interject, object and, when necessary, restrain others from doing harm to humanity. Being silent is the worse of all these problems. The solution is to speak, be heard, engage in conversation and debate, think critically and logically, plan long term and globally, take action immediately, compassionately. And if you can't be bothered to be a product member to this species, then you have a fee pass to remain silent for the rest of your valueless life.