Friday, January 31, 2014

Start With The Children

Dear Mr. President:

In the State of the Union message you talked about how to approach the problems of our economy. I wonder if we realize that our children are our economy. It is our children without whom we have neither future nor economy.

I was grateful for the focus on high-quality pre-K for every 4-year-old. This is probably the most important thing we could do to ensure a future of equality for all.

Two issues with this proposal need serious consideration. First, an adequate amount food essential for a young child’s growth. Vast numbers of the four year olds who will show up at the pre-K schools do not get enough food to eat.

Food is fuel for our children. Take the $4 billion a year from the bloated fossil fuel industries and invest it in food/fuel for our hungry future, our children. Veto the Farm Bill if it reaches your desk with the insane $8 billion cuts to the FS program. It is irrational to start a pre-K program for four year olds and to eliminate the fuel that large numbers of them need to run on.

The other issue is that “reaching more kids” means more teachers. More qualified teachers is probably the most significant problem we face in building our future. Our educational systems which drive the entire economy are in a deplorable state. We have millions of children who need to be educated. We have maybe one teacher for every couple hundred children. Many of these teachers are woefully under educated themselves and lack any real understanding of what children are, how they grow, what the need.

To make the envisioned pre-K program work, we need to recruit, educate and pay many thousands of teachers. This will be hard because the position of teacher has been denigrated to a point where only the most heart driven individuals will choose a discounted, third class job.

You have spoken to the need to produce individuals for our technological industries. The place to start such a program is to resurrect the teaching profession to point of respectability. The ignorance which fails to understand the essential role that teachers fill in shaping the consciousness of our children is a major source of our problems.

I guess what I am trying to say is that our children are Humanities’ first priority. Children need fuel/guidance or food/teachers, teachers that understand what “Teacher” means and signifies.

Fix this and the rest will follow.
-tom



Saturday, January 18, 2014

Saturday, January 18, 2014
Dear Mr. President;

I have always resonated to your enunciation, a clarion call to many, that we need to have Change That Matters!

The other day, while perusing a New York Times map graphic that showed the huge number of people living in poverty in various sections of just United State, I had a sudden realization of how stupid poverty is. It is simply irrational. There is no REASON for poverty to exist on the planet. It exists because of the lack of REASON.

I have written and published an article, much too long for a letter to you,  “Ignoromics: The Economics of Ignorance” in Thoughtline which is a monthly journal of commentary. While this article focuses mainly on economics, it explores the causes for the lack of reason which in general infect the programs and policies which drive all of our institutions and guarantees their historical and ongoing failure to generate change that matters, change that will meet the evolutionary objective of creating a planet of beauty, freedom, and equality.

For a very long time social theories concerning human rights, government, and economics, even scientific facts about the planet—It was only 500 years ago that we “knew” that the Earth was the center of the Solar System.—have been proclaimed by individuals whose conception of Reality was/is that we live on a one dimensional planet of dense physical matter surrounded by a not so dense, but physical never the less, atmosphere. This was—still is even by the majority in the scientific community!—the dominating conception of reality.

This vision which actually denies the existence of Reality, generates defacto systems like the Divine Right of Kings and the “fact” that the planet and everything on or in it, including all those human beings who are of lesser value than the rulers, is the “property” of those who occupy the top of the Hierarchy. Slavery is actually a built in cornerstone of this vision.

Change that truly matters will come about only when we replace this childish, ignorant, irrational, delusional, vision of reality with an adult understanding of the synthesis of the multidimensional cosmos in which we live.

We can address this kind of change best through the education of our sisters and brothers and especially our children, not to be employable, but to be educated and introduced to their true nature and the facts of Reality.

Lots of love

-tom