The Practical Necessity of Humility

We trust our judgement and believe we know best.  Not a problem at the grocery store, or at least not much of one, when you're deciding between apples.

Deciding for a nation, however, a wise leader listens intently, working to understand, realizing there can be unintended consequence for those served.  A wise leader humbly acknowledges there is much more to every circumstance, listens to those who disagree, and decides with an awareness that life and death are in the balance.

The wise listen and learn.  That's why they're wise.

Profession or Practice

We are guided in our lives by principles and values, things we were taught, perhaps, and which we've evaluated and adopted as worthy.  So, regarding those principles, our foundation for beliefs and behavior ... 

Our definitions require some practical clarity.

Important choices can require difficult work, honest analysis

Honesty, integrity, unselfishness, and love -- those are the standards we profess and toward which we strive.  These are not feelings we have.  They are the standards for actions we take, and the bar is a high one.

Arrogance and pride, greed and envy, anger, excess, and self -- those are the fail points, the corruption of any good intent.  Easily recognized in others, these are almost invisible to our self-awareness.  It's a difficult task for everyone.

The principles we profess versus the values we practice ... living a principled life can be challenging.

Sr Advisor to the Officer for Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at Department of Homeland Security August 2010 to July 2018

Scott Shuchart was senior staff at the DHS. He quit after officials ignored legal and ethical concerns that he and others raised over the separation of children from their parents at the border.

"... family separation was ... a deliberate human rights violation that senior members of the Administration wanted to undertake—where ... doing harm was the point.  Like use of military force, the idea of separating families was to use the fact of child trauma to change their parents’ behavior. I thought that was illegal (contrary to treaties and to the substantive due process prong of the Fifth Amendment), un-American, and seriously wrong."  

The courts have agreed.  It was and is illegal and an ethical failure of this administration and many appointees.

"Congress needs to undertake real oversight of what has happened in DHS in the last few years .... And I would love to have some further scrutiny of particular things that have gone very badly, such as Custom and Border Protection’s inability to keep records on the parents and children it separated, though there’s also some litigation that should bring those facts out too."

We profess our Christian values, we sing the songs in church, and we want to be right-thinking.  Then we make choices, day after day, year after year.  Sometimes, we get close to the standard,  and sometimes we're in the cesspool of corruption, and we're barely aware of the difference.  Unless ...
We have to continually pull back from the press of life and others, at least long enough to be reminded of what the standard is for right choice.  We face hard decisions every day.

• If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?
• Defend the weak, uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed, rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
• If anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?
• By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

Our interestingly polarized culture has retreated from many moral standards in recent decades.  It leaves one to wonder if perhaps our current chaotic environment is intended to pull back the curtain so we can see a bit more clearly who we have become.

Selfish or Not

"Why are people so cruel to the poor?"  ... an interesting question offered to me.

Six thousands refugees have died along the U.S./Mexico border
since 2000, and another 40,000 died around the world.
Just trying to survive ....

I’ve often wondered about choices. It seems that every possibility in front of us falls into one of only two categories; 
- I choose to benefit myself alone, or 
- I choose to include the good of others. 
The first is selfish, the second is not.

Choosing personal advantage, personal advance, personal profit can be selfish when compared to a choice that benefits others too.

Choices for personal pleasure across the spectrum of friendship, affection, and intimacy fall out similarly.  Hmmm.  Selfish or not.

Life choices as we give of ourselves to family and career, principle, faith and reason will all reflect our preference ….

A life of selfishness is a precipitous decline, repeatedly self-justifying wrong as though it were right and reasonable.

Each has a story, a reason for leaving their homeland.

And so we come to the question about poor … and to every other classification we apply to folks different from ourselves.  Our preference, either to include the good of others or to serve ourself alone, will determine how we relate and interact, how we affect the lives around us.

She's been walking for five weeks, 

carrying her daughters, aged 2 & 4.

Abandoned by the girls' father, she's

lived at the edge of survival.  She hopes

there will be help available somewhere.

As individuals, we choose to be selfish maggots or not.  Along the way, we are often influenced by others which can lead to collective selfishness.  The pervasive result is individual and cultural prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and cruelty, as we’ve seen through history.

Perhaps the worst of such selfishness is when one leads others astray.  For just one example, Hitler propagandized Jews as a criminal contamination of the country, and many people ... by believing, they chose the destruction of their own souls along with the minds and lives of their children.  The collective legacy is despised, a foul cesspool.    

If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, we’re warned, it would be better for them to have a great stone tied to their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea ... do whatever it takes, regardless of the price, to stay far, far away from that cesspool.

Some will indeed be led astray as leaders proclaim superiority vs. inferiority, they're liars or criminals and rapists ....

There will be many who learn the lesson, early or late, who will live graciously and with a good heart toward others. They’ll raise noble children, they’ll encourage so many along the way, and they’ll help those who could use a hand.  At the end, their lives will have been valuable beyond measure.

Cultures can be open and helpful, sometimes. Selfishness often corrupts good intent, and thoughtful individuals find themselves facing a difficult world.   Difficult, but perhaps not impossible ... to have a good heart toward others.

Bullying, Observant Children, and Today's Opportunity

Threats, insults, slander, and assault - these are the bully’s strategy of control through intimidation.

- “You weren’t thinking; you never do.”
- “What a stupid question… you ask a lot of stupid questions.”
- “She’s a loser who doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”

The bully learns such behavior from parents and others.  Their typical environment includes:

- frequent and escalating verbal conflict; attack, lie, deny, attack
- authoritarian control, i.e., my way or the highway
- loyalty required above ethics or conscience

Why do victims and witnesses allow this to continue?   Some are overwhelmed.  Some side with the abuser in their cause, no matter how harmful it may be. For others, the chaos brings hope that things will improve, and they become peacemakers to minimize the damage.  It is typically short-lived because the perpetrator thrives on chaos and control.

There are a few who refuse to accept abuse and stand up against it.  But then there are the enablers who stand by and watch and do nothing to challenge or end it. Lastly, there are those who cheer him on, relieved that they are not on the receiving end of his tirades.  The last two groups are complicit in the ongoing harm and life disruption.

Healthy response:
     - Recognize the behavior and the ego-centric absence of empathy.
     - Label it as it is – untruthful, disrespectful, malicious, deliberate harm.
     - Teach your children (age appropriately) in conversation and by example; these days are a great opportunity to learn through what they see.  Talk about honesty, integrity, respect, accountability, and self-control.  Talk about helping others, making a difference, and caring.  Show them how.

"I’ve become all too familiar with terminology like gas-lighting, and flying monkeys. I recognize the way he weasels out of his intolerable behavior by trying to apply that sick and twisted logic that only narcissists do to trick people into believing that *technically* what he’s doing isn’t wrong. I watch his devotees, who have backed themselves into a corner by investing so much of their own identities into their relationship to him, be a part of his flying monkey brigade.

It does remind me so much of my abusive childhood that unfortunately pitted me against my sister, and vice versa, just to survive it." – T.D.

Unlike growing up in abusive family, from which one can launch into an independent life, the continuing chaos and distrust brought on by the words and deeds of leadership today cannot be as easily overcome. Knowing the signs, recognizing when one’s perception is accurate or inaccurate, seeking support from discerning individuals, getting involved sociopolitically, getting info from legitimate sources, doing a fact check, if so inclined, and voting — these are perhaps ways to mitigate the impact on your life and family.

Open and objective conversation with those who think differently would perhaps be appropriate as well, but quite a challenge for most of us.

everything we are and have is at stake

"This war must be waged - it is being waged - with the greatest and most persistent intensity.  Everything we are and have is at stake.  Everything we are and have will be given."  
~ FDR State of the Union, January 3, 1945, the last year of the war and just a few weeks before he died.

As he spoke, a furious battle raged in the Ardennes.  It took 19,000 Americans lives, wounded 62,500, and left 23,500 captured or missing.  We lost hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles, and 647 aircraft.  The battle lasted forty days and nights.  It was the last major offensive by the Axis powers on the western front.  

By war's end, sixty million had died; 20 million military and 40 million civilian lives. 

Of the war deaths, 85% were among the Allies.  The Brits and Americans lost 400,000 each.  Half a million in the Philippines were killed.  In France, 600,000 died.  In French Indochina (Vietnam), more than a million starved. Eighteen million died in China.  In the Soviet Union, one quarter of the population was killed or injured; about 24 million civilians and soldiers died.  

There were atrocities, the product of strange ideological wickedness.  
In Europe, at least ten million ethnic Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, and other minorities were systematically murdered.   It was genocide.

In the Pacific, eight million civilians were murdered by Japanese occupation forces. Rape and murder in the Nanking Massacre took hundreds of thousands of lives; it was a small part of the Sankō Sakusen (kill all, burn all, loot all) practice that took the lives of millions more.

It was a war we had to fight.  

The alternative was an unthinkably inhuman world.  

The Cost: 60 million lives

Your family and every person you've ever met, every person you went to school with, every person you've ever seen, ten thousand times over, their lives ended brutally and their towns burned to the ground.  That's what it was like.

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The few can lead the many down a terrible path.  For complex reasons, they lie and distort moral values, and they justify deadly practices in the name of some goal or god; racial dominance and lebensraum, ethnic or religious superiority, economic advantage, or just plain selfishness ... hubris, greed, avarice, vainglory, from among the deadly sins.

The world wars of the 20th century were neither the beginning nor the end.  Conquest and empire have been and are still the norm for the wickedest among us, and Hitler was not the last.

The war to end all ...
and the few still lead the many. Today, it is economic warfare, the extraction of wealth from regions and populations by economic rulers.  It's a precarious balance between starving the ox that grinds the grain and continued viability.  Economic warfare, the pursuit of national dominance ... economist Michael Hudson explains:

Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago ...

Finance has moved to capture the economy at large, industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the educational system. (At over $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt came to exceed credit-card debt in 2012.)

The weapon in this financial warfare is no larger military force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay.

Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain. Indebting companies enables creditors to seize employee pension savings. And indebting labor means that it no longer is necessary to hire strikebreakers to attack union organizers and strikers.

The 2007-9 Great Recession was a poker hand overplayed by Wall Street enabled by government, and it crashed the world economy with deadly consequences.  The government bailout paid billions in bonuses to the killers and continued the government sanctioned war.  Not a single perpetrator was prosecuted, but thousands of protesters were jailed.

The recession cost every American $50,000 to $100,000.^[a][b]   In the developing world, food prices bounced, and hundreds of thousands died from starvation.  Around 500,000 died in sub-saharan Africa in the first year alone.  

Welcome to the 21st century.

The few lead ...  and the marketplace sets the pace.  Consumerist norms and materialism have reshaped the world.^[a]  Pornography is a multi-billion dollar international industry.^[b]   Narcissism^[c] has become the character trait visible in modern culture and sanctioned by national leadership.  Economic advantage is now the national goal as established by collaboration between government and the finance industry.  Extractive economics within and between nations brutally forces a widening gap between the elite and everyone else, the lower 90% on the economic ladder.  This is the world in which we and our children live, and our goals may not fit well in it. 

It is a war that has to be fought.  Everything we are is at stake, as are our children.  

Exit wounds.  Wars always have a price and recovery consumes lifetimes.

Sixty million.  The death toll from WWII was followed by decades of displacement and rebuilding; the lost years.

Sixty million+.  The death toll among natives (Africa, south Asia, and the Americas), victims of the colonial exploitation.  Most sub-saharan countries continue in the mire of economic deprivation today, as do most indigenous peoples. The lost centuries; most still have no voice.

Sixty million+.  That's the infant mortality (under 5 years old) from preventable causes for the last decade in the developing world.  They were sidelined by the wealthy. Families lost their precious children; they had no voice.

Sixty million+.  U.S. census data shows that half our population now qualifies as poor or low income,^[1] with one in five Millennials living in poverty.^[2]  The trap of multi-generational poverty and the GAP^[3] between rich and poor; they no longer have a voice in their future.

Academic contributors to The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States describe new forms of poverty in the U.S., a result of structural adjustment policies and globalization, which have rendered economically marginalized communities as destitute "surplus populations".^[3a]

Child poverty has reached record levels in the U.S., with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households, about 35% more than 2007.^[4]  A 2013 UNICEF report ranked the U.S. as having the second highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world.^[5] According to a 2016 study by the Urban Institute, teenagers in low income communities are often forced to join gangs, take school lunches home, sell drugs, or exchange sexual favors because they cannot afford food.^[6]

Things have changed.  Things are not like they were.
You were born into a world at war.  Everything you do matters.   ~ C.S. Lewis

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Are we to live our quiet, sheltered lives, insulated by what we have?   Or should we be training and equipping ... and fighting for what's right and just and good?

American Politics: a process that serves the people ... or a business?

"American distrust of the U.S. political system is at an all-time high. Many of us are concerned about the dysfunction in Washington and whether things will ever get better. Politics is an industry and the two dominant competitors do everything in their power to focus on serving their supporters and the special interests of those supporters."

Politics has become a profitable industry with an aggressive business model, just the sort of thing both Hamilton and Madison warned us against in the Federalist Papers.

$2.8 billion -- that's the direct revenue to the parties in 2018, as listed here. Separately, corporate players spent $1.6 billion on lobbying the politicians in hope of gaining some advantage.

The two-party system of politics today is a competitive business focused on dominance, not on comprehensive progress for the benefit of the nation. Recent stalemates in congress with party-line votes in critical issues illustrate that one aspect of the dilemma. Demonizing has replaced debate, and there is little public awareness of factual material. Misleading and deliberately false accusations are what the public is offered. Need examples?

Do we believe this is good, or perhaps otherwise?

What we want:

• Practical solutions that solve our nation’s most pressing problems
• Legislation that advances through Congress
• Broad-based buy-in from voters
• Respect for the rights of all voters

Helpful changes we might consider ...

• term limits
• lobbying and corporate influence boundaries
• again entrust federal agencies to research and recommend policy according to national priority and accepted standards
• a published federal agenda listing issues, priorities, and goals objectively
• prioritizing community security, education, and health above tax breaks for the wealthy
• separation of news from propaganda would be helpful, as the former law provided 
• accountability for false statements and misrepresentation, a standard we require of our children, would be appropriate as well
• reigning in the finance industry and removing the 'transfer of risk' instruments, reasonable constraints abandoned in '97

Any others come to mind?