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May 18, 2013
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Another fine mess…

So, we armed, trained and fought alongside [with small numbers of advisers and military personnel] the Viet Minh during WWII.  As we helped them against Japan, we were sewing the seeds of our future.  Later, in Afghanistan, we sent aid of various types and advisers to the Mujahideen, and guess who to fight the Soviets.  Yup, and sewed the seeds of that…  The initial Red Scare that led to all our communist fears, that thing that started in WWI and snowballed into Korea, Vietnam, and nukes beyond measure… That thing…  It was primarily a load of hogwash and hideous press coverage with dogmatic ideals promoted from monarchies and large business interests primarily based in or directly linked to Europe, and we bought in, hook, line, and sinker.  It is a travesty of our inheritance that we continuously disregard what George Washington warned us about and what he sternly suggested we do [in his letter to the American people upon his departure from office].  The Civil War also slides in there, so millions of Americans have died, millions more wounded, scarred or marred for life, generations swept into despair and idiocy, all for the sake of poor politics, self-serving or ignorant leadership, and the expanding interests of large corporations [our military is a great tool to service their needs].  WWII was the last of what we might argue to be a “just war,” although that is an ill-conceived phrase.

We need to start standing up for the betterment of the people, for our boys and girls, our children who will inherit yet another series of messes and errors, and we need to finely tune and hone our thinking and refining processes so we do not follow crowd mentality, learn to turn away from pundits paid for propaganda and agendas, and THINK and JUDGE for ourselves.     

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May 18, 2013

Slightly off-topic…

I just need a so-called “birther” explain to me why many amongst that crowd accept Ted Cruz, born in Canada (where he lived for at least four years of his early life) to a Cuban-born father is acceptable as a presidential candidate and someone whose actual birth certificate says he was born in Hawaii to a father of Kenyan origin is not acceptable as president.  Obviously it is crowd psychology that requires no reason but only an idea or dogma.  Maybe it’s not…  I await a solid argument containing reason (not intuition, speculation, and pathos).  

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May 17, 2013
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"The only real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of its dead or the illusions it has forged."

— Gustav Le Bon [1896 - we don’t like to think this way, but we need to at least probe it]

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May 13, 2013
"To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour [sic] of an ignorant rhetorician."

— Gustav Le Bon [as he points out that history is myth at best, so what we build off it against the grain of psychology and often in direct conflict of what we know is the mass-minds]

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May 13, 2013
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"The acquisition of knowledge for which no use can be found is a sure method of driving a man to revolt."

— Gustav Le Bon [1896, and we do this more and more…  Perhaps we will turn the corner with our present shift, but it remains to be seen and it will take many years]

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May 11, 2013
"The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally transformed. A crowd thinks in image, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first."

— Gustav Le Bon [Today we see the crowd in many forms: internet groups, subscribers to websites, groups gathering for this or that cause, finding like minds in whatever corner of existence they can in order to have ‘safety in numbers’ to be able to speak, act, feel and behave in a fashion which others, sitting as an individual, they would, upon actual reflection and consideration, hardly consider worthy of them (even perhaps diametrically opposed to what the person actually believes or feels).  We have seen this in racist activities, we see it in political partisanship, tribal behaviors, and recent things like the gun issues in the US… to name but a few.]

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May 11, 2013
"…works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts, accompanied by explanations the result of reflection."

— Gustav Le Bon [1896 - and even though these are a valued way to look, he argues that looking at architecture, art, creative literature/fiction, and remaining structures and styles are the closest we can come to understanding anything remotely resembling a study of history.  He adds, “…history is scarcely capable of preserving the memory of anything except myths”  and as much as it hurts me to say it, he is 100% correct - we see the mythos built up today around people who are still alive, let alone that of characters like the Founding Fathers, Gandhi, Hitler, Richard II, or Martin Luther King Jr.  So much myth and legend, sharing and hyperbole, that knowing the real men, the real circumstances, the real behind-the-scenes and spoken and perceived truth is next to impossible]

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May 09, 2013
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"It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded."

— Hannah Arendt [1971.  Ha, well, do I really need to say anything with this one?  Really?  Today, in our world?  We can’t even formulate a sincere question on the national stage, ha, so…]

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May 09, 2013
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"Bad witnesses are eyes and ears for men if they have barbarian souls."

— Heraclitus [and he can be happy he is not alive today to witness the degradation and dissipation of humankind into the mire of media messages and the rotting refuse of political pundits and leaders in our nation - and it’s weird; we assume it is the same everywhere, but it’s not folks…  We wallow in the mire of our own making and play with our gadgets to distract us from the stench and vile bodies that bury our thoughts and persona on an hourly and sometimes moment-by-moment basis]

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May 09, 2013

Common Core

We all know what the toughest thing will be with Common Core throughout education in the US, from K-12.  We have been teaching young people NOT to THINK but to respond and KNOW right/correct answers, to know other people’s thoughts and hold them dogmatcally correct and unchallenged.  We have taught them to answer A, B, C or D, to shorten responses to simplistic twitter-like lengths at best, and to read, via the standardized tests, short passages [and then wonder why they don’t like to read long works when they get older (many used to like reading when they were in elementary school, but they soon wisen up and realize they are not going to be tested in a large scale and “high stakes” fashion on those - only short passages of little-to-no relevance to them on any level… “read what you need” - young people are clever and pragmatic, and our system has taught them these lessons all too well].  The material they learn dissipates from their memories almost as soon as they are tested because it held no depth of thought, no connections, and no real value.  

Now we ask them to THINK, to reason out, through deduction, induction or possibly abduction, a response, attach to that response relevance and logical textual references and discourse, and to analyze the potential cause and effect relations or some great significance.  We will now ask them to peruse real-life situations and problems, require them to engage in Socratic dialogue, and learn to listen, broaden horizons and perspectives, and respond with banks of knowledge and greater depth of thought.  

On paper this may sound like an easy task, but in many states and schools, having killed creativity, innovation, oral communication skills, and the search for knowledge and truth, having obliterated independent critical analysis, having turned our school system into one producing Visigoths instead of Athenians, we will suffer sincere growing pains.  Many in the political spectrum  and media [clamoring for ratings and someone to listen to them talk and talk, rant and rave] will spout out vitriol against Common Core and all it purports to offer and beckon for a return to the older and antiquated standards and associations with the much hated NCLB and prior legislation [NCLB heralded as the heal-all for the nation proved otherwise in Texas shortly after George W took office, and then the nation felt the repercussions as NCLB dug its claws into the cultural and social milieu of the nation so deeply that the idiocy and wallowing in mediocrity was barely noticeable].  They will do so out of love of ease, desire to return to the good old days that never were and never can be, and a wondrous ignorance of actual learning and education, actual histories related to learning, individual and communal growth and the stated goals and knowledge of the Founding Fathers for an educated populace in order to preserve the democracy they knew was a fragile and tenuous experiment they began in the 18th Century with so much blood, sweat and tears.  

We need to resist the return to NCLB’s idiocies and standardized multiple choice tests and short passage responses and embrace the process of thinking, of questioning and following Socratic and Platonic methods, following the ideals of the Athenians, those folks who also experimented with democracies of sorts back a few thousand years ago and upon whom our Founding Fathers called for wisdom based upon their own intelligence, knowledge, and depth of thought - their own variable perceptions and value of understanding and compromise, community and identity.  We need to weather the storms ahead bravely and with steadfastness of character and purpose.  

Common Core is not a panacea, and it is not a cure-all.  It is not a vision of excellence to solve all our societal woes and lead us into the distant future, but it is a STEP in the right direction, and it is a STEP long OVERDUE.  It is ONE small step for America, and one GIANT step for MANKIND [and its perpetuity and potential].  

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May 09, 2013
"The divine right of the masses is about the replace the divine right of kings."

— Gustav Le Bon [1896…  Today it is manifest, and he also says the crowd has no rules just force and dogma, no science, simply response and feeling, without forethought and logic.  And we wonder why the US, so enthralled with its own technology and toys (guns, appliances, cars, sports…) is awash in mass movements with little-to-no sense or real understanding of community, life and rational thought]

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May 03, 2013
"…since the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie [it’s a common term, not some Marxist plot, so if the term bothers you, well words apparently kill, so…] have turned Christianity into a disembodied wraith."

— Jacques Ellul [and in reading the documents from the era, in looking at things that led to this, in searching through Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (by R. H. Tawney) this is a serious perspective that should cause us to question why we do and say what we do and say (and act out) like we do today]

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May 03, 2013
"We moderns have a very false idea of what Christians believed in the third and eleventh centuries."

— Jacques Ellul [and since I studied the early papacy and am reading the church documents and reports from the Third and Fourth Century, well, add in the time since, the dissipation of truth and reality, and you have today’s dogma and focus on moral rules and “how tos” rather than what was real and true then, rather than the spirit of life, truth, and Jesus…]

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May 03, 2013
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Individualism

One of the wonderful ironies is that the individual would not be recognized as such, would not be able to be called as such without the community, without the rest of us.  What is even more ironic is that people strive for this so-called individualism with the spectrum and kaleidoscope via comparisons and relations with the masses.  Add to this that an individual could not be seen as one, could not even exist without the masses, and what exactly is individualism and how important is it really?  

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May 03, 2013
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Christology 101: In tears of realization, epiphanies upon epiphanies...

christology101:

As I read Teilhard’s account of his attachment to the Front of WWI, his engagement in it as a medic, and his recollections of the actions, battles, and realizations and knowledge gained and garnered through it, I thought of the First World Poetry I have read, German, British, Canadian, French, and…

In my own little way, I get this…  I see the lacking in us, almost all of us.  I see the edges of the incredible human that grew out of this Front…  Glimmers and shadows only, for not being there, nothing else can be seen, but it opens the eyes a crack so that we too can begin the greater journey…  May it be so with you.