Responsible Ownership of Weapons

It is amazing how our debate about the ownership of rifles and guns has devolved into such a heated partisan issue.  The weapon manufacturers have been working hard to arm everyone in the name of profits.  The moral issue of responsible ownership has become lost in the calls for "gun" control.  The most ludicrous part of the arguments is the fear of those who are not responsible owner of weapons causes the call for unregulated ownership of those same weapons.

The second amendment with its indirect language has provided fuel for both sides.  It reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." During the discussions after the Parkland shootings a representative of the NRA was defending their position on this topic and stated that all gun owners are the militia.  

I like this idea.  It makes the language clearer.  Gun owners belong to a "well regulated" militia to help provide security for a free state.  It is my opinion this gives the state the right to provide laws for responsible ownership. 

Educational Organization

Education is still mostly organized around control.  We have been operating on a 19th century philosophy developed by Prussians to teach cohorts of students, based on age teaching the same subjects each day.  We use a technique that pours information into their brains and those who can not keep up are rejected or shunned in some way by the establishment.  The twentieth century brought about Pavlov and his ideas of reward and punishment.  These became the established system for controlling students in their classrooms.  The primary example is grades, A for the hard worker and F for the lazy.  The rhetoric is straight our to Protestant orthodoxy.  Work hard, live a good life and you will go to heaven. This system fit neatly into an industrial society where creativity and critical thinking were not important for the average worker who basically shifted widgets around for the owners of industry.

These concepts and philosophies never worked because they are antithetical to learning.  Certainly those who were motivated to learn did so, but those who had no support and found the lessons difficult had no way to excel in this system.  There were many more drop outs than graduates of the system.

The end of the 20th century brought the technological revolution which required that education actually teach students knowledge they would need to work.  Not just basic skills and science but, retrieval of data that they would use in the workplace.  This includes creative and critical thinking,  research skills  and social emotional maturity necessary necessary to work cooperatively as teams to develop, plan and create. 

As Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms shift slowly and much of what we know about learning has been discovered in the last thirty years.  Changes in our thinking has been shaped by neuroscientists who delve into the physical brain to discover how it works.  These discoveries have debunked the systems of reward and punishment we have used to control students in school.  There have also been many experiments in education to find out what is the best way to organize for learning and it is not large groups of children, sitting at desks listening to a teacher talk.

The primary finding is that when children are treated with respect and given individual support they do much better.  One of my favorite stories is about a free school in Massachusetts where students are not required to do any academic work.  There were no classrooms, no desks, no prescribed curriculum.  The students sit on committees that hire teachers and make decisions about the nature of the school.  They can learn anything they want, when they want and choose how they want to learn.  One girl, for whom this school was a last chance for education due to her behavior, decided that she would leave. There were no guards, no rules about attendance.  As she reached the street she had an epiphany.  Why am I leaving there are no reasons to do so.  She turned around and decided to pursue her education. We must have internal motivation to truly learn.

If we want school to be a place where learning is a center of organization rather than control we must rethink our schools.  To certain extent the charter movement has cut into traditional schools but they have not been embraced by the establishment.  We must decentralize our classrooms, understand how humans learn and treat all students with dignity and respect before our education system will be center on learning.

Religion is a Mythic Journey

Religion is a mythic journey through life that requires dependence upon a guide.  To make life's journey alone is frightening and requires the courage to destroy the objects of the myth by understanding they are projections and fantasies.  Then a new space is created that is reality and an individual can discover that those fantasies and projections are inside themselves. Now the journey of their life can continue as reality and experience.

Faith in America's Promise

In America, we have had faith that our country's systems work. The systems of self-rule, liberty and justice along with a government of the people, by the people and for the people are the primary values we depend upon to keep us together and inspire the rest of the world. It seems as though our current president's followers have lost faith in the democratic process and no longer care about the rule of law. They can ignore all of this president’s behavior as long as he gives them Supreme Court justices and panders to their racial sentiments. The few have decided that they can elevate their leader to the status of dictator and that will be ok as long as they get their way.

For some reason nobody else matters besides them. It is a sad day when resentment and anger replace democracy and justice. When personal gain is more important than cooperative self interest. Our country's infrastructure is outdated and unreliable. While other countries invest in themselves we no longer seem to have the will to keep our nation functional. Looking at America today is like driving through the poorest of neighborhoods and seeing their unhappiness in the way they maintain their homes, their streets and their communities.

What has happened to our pride in ourselves? Why do we no longer care about our country's infrastructure nor how our neighbor feels? I think the answer is the lost faith in the promise of America. We do not understand that all progress has setbacks, but the general trend of history is technological and human progress. Our lives are much better than they were 100 years ago. Go back as far as you wish and we live much better than ever and better than most people in the world today.
America does not have a perfect past, nobody does. We do not treat everybody with equity and our past is littered with violence against others who were in the way of America's image of itself. Part of evolution is a change in the way cultures view outsiders. America is working its way through these problems. Not smoothly, not to everyone's satisfaction nor quickly enough in today's world of instant communications. Our problems are transparent and have become the discussion of everyday life. We are constantly confronted with the problems caused by racism, exclusion, violence, greed and resentment. Only by confronting who we are can we reduce the anxiety and stress brought by these issues.

America's struggles is the tension that has  determined what type of culture we live in and has driven us to where we are today. To a certain degree, the states take some of the pressure of culture change. Each state does not change at the same pace as our national culture and allows citizens who are reluctant to change to have time to accept and adopt the changes . The culture of America is making a fundamental change to one that accepts all people as equal citizens and views cooperation as a better value than competition.

America is even bigger than the culture wars that are being waged there. It is a large diverse group of human beings who have mostly agreed on the basic values of self-rule, liberty and justice. This is what draws people to this country, the promise of these values. This promise has been spread across the globe and in this time of technological communications people world wide understand the change America is bringing about. That is a government of the people, by the people and for the people with liberty and justice for all. We must maintain our faith in the promises we have made to ourselves and the world.

The non existent U.S.A.

So, one side believes the "nanny" state weakens America and that taxes should be so low to be almost nonexistent.  They do not want the government to regulate businesses that pollute, dirty our water, tear up our land and use common resources for their own purposes unwilling to share with the people.  They do not want people in need to go to the government for help. I guess I am astounded at the idea that so many citizens are ok with this.  Why has the idea of a government for the people, by the people and of the people been so easily lost in this era?  Maybe everyone agrees that government should be to help the rich get richer.  No need to encourage the promise that America is land of liberty and justice for all.

Nativist or Accommodation?

The U.S. has never been a truly moral country, even though we talk as if we are above moral reproach. The biggest lies we tell are to ourselves, which keeps us from facing our morality. The lies are not necessary because that is who we are.  All countries do bad things, all countries do good things.  Mostly bad things are done for nativist purposes, to create an illusion of morality, and what good things are done come about to accommodate all the majority.

The U.S. is a great country because of our promise.  The promise of liberty and justice for the average person resonates across the world.  The U.S. set up a system to bring that about.  We have not always lived up to our promise, but we continually work toward making that promise come true.

It is the tension between the belief in our morality and our actions that brings about the great changes that have occurred.  As we draw more people who are different into our promise the tension increases until change occurs.  Throughout our history the change has usually been advantageous for everyone. However, sometimes the change is a war, ostensibly to protect ourselves.

The problem from the tension is that nativist want to impede progress in order to keep their world intact while progress is causing change to occur.  With a population as large as the that of the U.S. , it is imperative to find common ground and be willing to compromise.

Time Travel

 

Neuroscientists Say

Our memories are never accurate because we create our lives from overly plentiful data that must be filtered by our brain as it decides what we saw or felt or tasted, even memories of those we love are closer to creative non fiction
than truth.  It makes me wonder
how in the hell humanity has progressed
at all.

We tend to think that time is moving forward, but is it really?  The true time machine is the human mind which allows us to encounter any time period in human history we can discover.  Because there is so much incoming information the human brain allows us to see what it expects us to see.  So if  your neurons have been habituated during walks in the woods, when you walk in the woods your brain determines what you see based on what you have seen.

Which leads me back to time travel.  If you immerse yourself in the 1890s, according to brain studies, I would think you should expect to see the 1890s. What do you think?