Kahlil Gibran’s “On Children”

How often do you cross paths with a parent who is attempting to make his or her children in the parent's image and likeness? I see it on a regular basis. The prototypical case is the parent who didn't make it to the Broadway stage who tries to turn his/her child into a Broadway performer. You often see parents who demand athletic excellence from their kids, often (it seems) in an effort to compensate for the parent's failed strivings to make it big in sports. This style of parenting reaches every high-earning or high-prestige profession.  Or maybe it's not to make up for the parents own failings as much as it is an attempt to create a trophy child so that, at cocktail parties, the parent can nonchalantly drop a few hints about his or her child's (sometimes admittedly spectacular) accomplishments. This afternoon, a friend sent me a perfect antidote for this mindset. It's a poem by Kahlil Gibran, titled "On Children." Upon reading it, I was reminded of the following quote by Friedrich Nietzsche:  “What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.”

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Bill Moyers explains the concerns of Occupy Wall Street

Bill Moyers recently gave the keynote speech at Public Citizen's 40th anniversary Gala. In addition to the video of that speech, I have transcribed various excerpts from his excellent speech. During his speech, he made it quite clear that he fully understands the concerns of the occupy Wall Street protesters. Except for the bracketed material each of the following is a quote by Bill Moyers at the Public Citizen 40th Anniversary Gala: While it's important to cover the news, it's more important to uncover the news. One of my mentors at the University of Texas told our class that "news" is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. And when a student asked the journalist and historian Richard Reeves for his definition of real news, he answered, "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." - [We now have what historian Lawrence Goodwin has described as] "a mass resignation of people who believe the dogma of democracy at a superficial level, but who no longer believe it privately." - We have a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions of people. - We hold elections knowing that they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by a majority of Americans. - The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly veneration of wealth are now openly enforced, and the common denominator a public office, including for our judges, is a common deference to cash. - Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats and then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 per person. And that's the norm. They get away with it. - Let's name it for what it is: Democratic deviancy, defined downward. - Politics today is little more than money laundering in the trafficking of power and policy. - Why are the occupiers there? They are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied America - Citizens United: Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. - [At the 12 minute mark of the video, Moyers discusses corporate personhood and the laws damaging public welfare resulting therefrom] - The Roberts Court has picked up the mantle: Money first, the public second, if at all. - [At the 14 minute mark: the damage done by Citizens United]

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Glenn Greenwald discusses justice for some

Glenn Greenwald recently appeared on Dylan Ratigan's television show to discuss his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Greenwald argued that many of our leaders don't even pretend anymore that we should aspire to fairness.   Here's the thought process underlying these claims we so often hear from those who oppose the Occupy movement: "Inequality will be deserved and legitimate because were all playing on an equal playing field."  According to Greenwald, the reason for so much citizen anger (tea party and occupy protesters) is a growing perception that this inequality

is not the byproduct of fair and reasonable and well-deserved accomplishments but the byproduct of cheating, of a tilted playing field, that the winners exempt themselves from the rules to which the rest of us are bound. Typically, it is the law that constrains the most powerful from abusing their power. When law ceases to apply to them, as it has, the only solution that citizens have is to go outside of the system of law and begin to demand that change. That is why so many citizens are taking to the streets and protesting and realizing that working within the system is no longer a viable course of action.

How can this energy be harnessed, for instance through the Occupy movement?

The status quo--the failure to accommodate or to adhere to rules for anyone outside of this 99% is itself extremely volatile and itself extremely dangerous and destructive in that a course of action where citizens do go out on the streets in the United States has become a more attractive and really the only alternative for effectuating the kind of change that people thought that the 2008 campaign would bring.

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LEAP once again points out the insanity of the “war on drugs”

The following information is from a mass emailing I was recently sent by LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition):

Late Friday night the White House issued a typical evasive rejection of the several marijuana legalization petitions that collected more signatures than any other issue on its "We the People" website. Even though recent polls show that more voters support marijuana legalization than approve of President Obama's job performance, the White House categorically dismissed the notion of reforming any laws, focusing its response on the possible harms of marijuana use instead of addressing the many harms of prohibition detailed in the petitions. One of the popular petitions, submitted by retired Baltimore narcotics cop Neill Franklin, called on the Obama administration to simply stop interfering with states' efforts to set their own marijuana laws.
It's maddening that the administration wants to continue failed prohibition polices that do nothing to reduce drug use and succeed only in funneling billions of dollars into the pockets of the cartels and gangs that control the illegal market," said Franklin, who serves as executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a group of cops, judges and prosecutors who support legalizing and regulating drugs. "If the president and his advisers think they're being politically savvy by shying away from much-needed change to our drug policies, they're wrong. The recent Gallup poll shows that more Americans support legalizing marijuana than support continuing prohibition, so the administration is clearly out of step with the people it claims to represent. President Obama needs to remember his campaign pledge not to waste scarce resources interfering with state marijuana laws and his earlier statement about the 'utter failure' of the drug war.
United States spends $52 Billion every year attempting to enforce prohibition, a demonstrably futile endeavor. From a recent article in Esquire Magazine, we get to know the "War on Drugs" by the numbers: "15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year."  Don't believe the White House numbers that claim we're spending more on treatment than law enforcement--those are cooked numbers, and they are shot down by the numbers in the Esquire article. Therefore, the "war on drugs" is, indeed a matter of good versus evil, but not in the way the federal government preaches.  Ken Burns' recent documentary, "Prohibition," shines a bright light on every mistake we are now making regarding street drugs. I'll conclude with a quote by Albert Einstein:  "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

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Why does Santa Claus let so many African children starve to death?

Tomorrow is Halloween, the day when Americans agree that it’s OK to talk about death, evil spirits and depravity while eating lots of unhealthy food. These traditions seem normal to those of us who have done this October drill more than a few times, but Halloween must seem completely bonkers to outsiders. I suspect that Halloween serves as a psychological safety valve, allowing us to air out our anxieties about our deepest fears. On Halloween, we talk about these horrible things (dismemberment and other forms of horror) together while laughing—there’s seemingly safety in numbers. And then we make sure that we avoid talking about these things for the remainder of the year. On days other than Halloween, we don’t like to be reminded of the fact that there are skeletons inside of our bodies and that we’re all on a treadmill leading to inevitable death, and that there is no evidence of any afterlife. These things freak us out because there is no cure, no fix, other than working hard to fabricate that everything is OK.  For most of the year, we follow the pattern predicted by Terror management Theory: we cover up the fact that we are mortal animals through the use of elaborate diversions and baubles, pretending that we are Gods with anuses.  I often attempt to do otherwise, and to share my thoughts freely, but I admit that my fear of inevitable death occasionally gets the better of me too. Thus, I do think I understand the need for something like Halloween in a society that heavily discourages free-thinking about disturbing topics. These topics are heavy to me too, though regularly delve into these topics rather than dousing myself in Halloween tradition or seeking comfort by joining a traditional religion. For most people, though, Halloween rituals seem to offer a bit of relief from this admittedly heavy existential anxiety. Thanksgiving is coming around the corner, and we have ready-made myths to take care of our anxieties related to that holiday too.  Thanksgiving is the time for many Americans to unquestionably repeat the myth that benevolent Europeans were welcomed to American by the Native Americans: “Hello, white people. Make yourselves at home. Take our possessions and our land. Send us to reservations.” One little story about Europeans sharing a meal with Native Americans takes care of thousands of pages of inconvenient history. One little myth kicks in the confirmation bias and invites Americans to believe that they live on a moral oasis, and that it’s OK to strictly filter our history in order to think happy thoughts about how many of us came to be here. Pass the turkey, please. What kind of myth would extend one’s belief in a moral oasis almost all the way to the new year? If you owned a magic sleigh and you were capable of creating and distributing toys and food all over the world, why would you ignore the children of Africa? The evidence suggests that Santa skips them year after year, even though many of them are dying of starvation and malaria.  Further, this tragedy is something that American children don’t discuss in the context of the Santa myth. But if you’re magical then, damn it, what’s more important? More iPods for well-to-do American families (it seems like Santa gives well-to-do American families better gifts) or basic food, water and medicine to prevent African children from starving?  Maybe Santa doesn’t care about African children. Or maybe he doesn’t know about the existence of Africa because his Atlas is out of date.  Or maybe he avoids Africa there’s not much snow there. But, again, we don't discuss the Africa problem with our children when we tell them about the magic and benevolence of Santa Claus, and we are silent because Africa is inconvenient to the Santa story. The increasingly dominant prosperity Gospel churches preach that Jesus wants us to hit the stores hard on Black Friday because we deserve to have lots of stuff. Many Americans are attracted to churches that advise them that admission to heaven is through faith, and not good works. It’s OK with this Faith version of Jesus that we buy lots of consumer goods rather than saying no to ourselves and sending all of that gadget money to organizations that can truly feed starving African children and provide them with mosquito nets. Year after year, the Santa myth serves as a focus-mechanism of a precious human commodity—attention--that makes certain aspects of the world salient at the expense of downplaying others. That is the general mechanism of all myths. They are colored filters for reality. In these modern times, our many comforting myths need some serious self-critical analysis, but that is unlikely, because their power is in their uncritical repetition. All of this immediately makes sense when we remind ourselves that we choose our myths—they don’t fall down from the sky. [http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-santa-in-his-christmas-sled-or-sleigh-silhouette-image20920349 used with permission.  Map of Africa - creative commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Africa_(orthographic_projection).svg]

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