Monday, February 25, 2008

Who are "We"?

I think it is important to reject the ways that the term "we" is loosely used to describe the world's population or even the U.S. population, when what is being described only accounts for the elite few.

The elite do have more sophisticated technology to move what they call information more quickly and to a wider audience. However, they are still in the minority and claims that they speak for the majority or even in the majority's best interest, can be easily proved as false with a lot less effort and sophisticated exposier than most people are taught to believe.

Claiming that those who are not speaking up have nothing valid to say has been the biggest accomplishment of every government since the beginning of time as well as the worst crime.

Too often "we" the majority don't speak up about what we really think because we are not choosing to think for ourselves or that what we think isn't important.

I don't believe that formal education or the use of eloquent or sophisticated speech are liberaters until or unless they are offered to everyone who wants that ability or set of skills. Even then, if education doesn't accomidate difference AND promote it, then it's nothing more than a mind altering training camp being used to divide, label, oppress and eliminate anyone and everyone who can be seen as unwilling to conform.

When it comes to deciding on laws that govern everyone as pertaining to how we can best be protected from foriegn and domestic abuse, then it is very important to open ongoing discussion and continue to refine the best ways to do that. However:

1) Cut out the laws that (without proof that the behavior or condition of a person will lead to violence) are being used to make false claims. Continuing to use unjust profiling as an excuse for suspicion and/or unprovoked aggression will eventually include everyone.

2) Personal and societal responsibility cannot be divided for conveinience sake. Any collective representation must include both or it will include neither.

3) A, B, C, D, and F are not a sufficient number of grades to make up a fair grading system for scholastic achievement to meet even a small portion of the population. Also, no society and no government has ever been able to predict, assume or assign age appropriate development of human anything.

4) The only plan for economic growth in the U.S. is using would require a decrease in population so that fewer people and fewer types of people would be accomidated. You won't benefit from such a policy if you are not here.

Do you think that billboards and T.V. advertisements about 1 autistic born every 20 minutes is for the purpose of the kind of awareness that would promote better education, accomidations, and job opportunities for autistic people?

I wish that people would think about the ways that they talk about the autism "spectrum" in relationship to how others (who don't have the best interest of autistics as a priority) might be using such spectrum related speech to harm rather than help us.

The whole world is too interdependent on each other for anyone to make any kind of claim that they are representive of the popular vote. Certainly the U.S. has never been liberated and free to make such a claim.

Claiming that the U.S. HAS a middle class that is filled with soccer moms with 2.3 kids, drive mini vans, and live in suburbia, may be the way to get a Clinton in the white house but it doesn't make it anymore true.

Even if the majority were the most influential voice, as long as there are lawmakers, laws, unfair influence of wealthy corporations, and the oppression of groups of people for no other reason than that they don't fit the advertised veiw of acceptable, then no one is liberated and no one is free. The reason for that is that by liberating yourself at the expense of another is the way that people imprison themselves. When freedom comes at the expense of giving up your freedom then you aren't free.

The people who are seen to have power and influence in the U.S. have designed our very perception of what power and influence looks like. They have not earned what they have at all. They create the misperception of being in the majority like The wizard of Oz created this misperception.

We are not making decisions that influence how our government is run. We are not the ones that influence policy's, laws, the people who make those laws and poilicies, or the people who enforce them.

However, those who have traded their conscience and itegrity in order to give other people the false impression that they have power, cannot convince themselves of what they try to convince others of. Therefore they have lost themselves and are truly powerless.

We who are not seen as having this power and influence, who choose not to follow in these peoples footsteps, actually do have REAL power. We have lots of abilty that we aren't using. This power and collective but diverse ability is more than sufficient enough to change the world. In order to use what we have, we must reject what we have been taught. If we start thinking in ways that they have taught us that we can't and or shouldn't , a true representation of who we are will have a chance to emerge and be heard.


Thursday, February 14, 2008

Entitlement and Commitment.

I am aware of a method of how to approach the subject of entitlement and commitment with my questions and thoughts. Answers to these questions and conclusions to these viewpoints are what promotes discussion. I have not found a method of participating in discussion based on how the process of discussion has been presented to me. Weather or not this is a self imposed limitation or not, I do feel that I pay a price for it. While it may seem to afford me certain liberties, it also creates a lot of bounderies. I am commited to the process (as I understand it) just the same.

Throughout a persons life, one is presented with liberties and prices for the attainment of those liberties. Love is an equal exchange that includes a great deal of trust, faith and commitment.

When one commits to more than one person, pledging your faith and trust can become more complex. An organized group who have some common interest or view seems complex enough, but a family.... the faith and trust involved in everyones commitment must be beyond what any human could ever prepare for.

Once a person, a couple, or group of people, take responsibility for another (a child for instance) before and/or without that persons consent (or their willingness to make that same commitment to common goals), they have the potential for all extreme situations, both terrible and great. When a person is placed into an environment that is not of their choosing, the continual progressive realization of everyone involved will require a great deal of vulnerability on everyones part.

To describe that vulnerability in scientific or mathmatical terms seems quite impractical. The emotion of love, along with the faith and trust in your own ability as well, as others ability to comprehend the complexities of that commitment is a part of a complex network that no ones words could ever describe.

Once a person makes a commitment to another to be responsible for that person's well being, nothing entitles that person to break that commitment. If you make a decision based only on romantic love, it lacks the commitment to reach the goal that the decision was meant to accomplish. Romantic love without commitment places love in a box that that is unattainable to you or those whom you intend it for. It cheapens the most wonderful feeling or expression to being nothing more than every other fleeting thought and emotion that anyone may experience at any time.

In this way, any whimsical notion, in one moment of indecision, can take every joyful expectation and dream you ever had and allow that to transition into the worst fearful nightmare you can imagine.

For civilization of any kind to continue at all in this world, it will require the vulnerability of commitment, and then the safety and courage that accompanies that commitment will sustain our civilization. Just as a coward dies a thousand deaths, the lack of commitment will bring about it's own punishment and that punishment will be servere. The decision to strenghten the emotion of love that accompanies your commitment will strengthen that same courage and the love that makes your commitments joyful and hopeful.

When you instead allow your decisions to be based on frivilous and fleeting thoughts and the experiances that accompany those thoughts you will suffer the injuries of battle that accompanies your frivilous and fleeting thoughts that you use in vain to secure the rewards of the commitments that you weren't willing to really work for.

No government, church, judge or jury on earth will decide this punishment. Nature has it's own system of justice.

When a child is born and you as a parent or guardian chooses to love that child, it is a romantic love that must be fostered and renewed like all love. If what you romantisize about what you will experience with the child (or even what you want the child to experience ) you may have to let go of those romantic hopes if (for whatever reason) that is not going to happen. This is because your child can't afford to feel this disappointment based on learning that they should be disappointed because you are. Besides such grieving is misguided, unnecessary, and it doesn't help you any either.

Whatever you desire (based on subjective, arbitrary, and romantisized notions) for your child to experiance or achieve based on their ability, that doesn't happen the way you hoped or planned, this doesn't entitle you to to judge them or their experience as less valuable or less worthy of all the joy you can bring them. It also doesn't entitle you to judge what they provide to you as any less worthy of what you provide to them.

If you make a commitment to love someone(spouse, partner,etc.) it will originally be based partly on the romantic notions of what you hope for someone to become. Whatever may stand in the way of that, may require you to foster your love for them in different ways. A commitment to love someone isn't subject to change based on what you decide you want later on. It becomes a commitment when you make it or it isn't a commitment at all.

Also your willingness to act everyday in ways that strengthen that love is what reminds the other person that you meant it in the first place and when it reminds you of that too, then your love and commitment for each other can become more powerful than any challenge.