Culture

The current infatuation with multiple cultures in America seems enlightened on the surface. However, it is important to bear in mind that cultures often stand in the way of greater human progress. Idolizing a culture without a critical and analytical eye is childishly naive.

I was aghast yesterday as I listened to an NPR quiz show. The guest celebrity was a rap singer who was overtly and unabashedly bragging about his American subculture of violence, robbery and drug abuse. The audience seemed to find this quite humorous. I found it disturbing and symptomatic of a sick society.

Similarly, the recent fascination in America with Islamic cultures seems a natural reaction to being aggressively attacked on September 11th, 2001 by a wealthy Saudi madman and his minions. However, the equivocation of cultures which behead women for adultery and hang young men for being gay to American culture is just plain stupid. Many Americans seem unable to take the critical step to investigate a culture's full spectrum of positive and negative traits. I speculate that this is based in intellectual laziness or a delusion that smiling at everything about a culture will keep people from that culture from creating mayhem.

Human cultural development follows patterns which can be readily discerned by studying history critically and analytically. This implies the use of science, a foreign culture indeed for many contemporary Americans, it seems. Science isn't about being blissfully ignorant. It isn't about denying the unpleasant in hopes that it will go away.

Multiculturalism in America can serve a wonderful purpose to enrich the greater American culture. However, the present approach media and politicians are taking toward multiculturalism is shallow and inane, generally. Blanket acceptance of any culture as "great" or "cool" is counterproductive. Fostering the elements of any culture which advance universal human rights and world peace is common sense. Learning the difference takes time, study and openness to truth.

Police

This post-911 world has taken us back to a time before the lessons learned during the Viet Nam War era. Now, for example, every soldier is a hero in the media. The Viet Nam War era taught us, however, that front line soldiers are actually socioeconomic pawns. In fact, in an all volunteer army, soldiers are most often the desperately poor who sign away their freedom and ethics for a college education or a meager living as a career soldier.

Another lesson of the Viet Nam War era informed us that police also work for politicians and business interests over the interests of the common citizen. When average citizens protested against racism during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and against war in the late Viet Nam War era and against homophobia in the Gay Liberation struggle of that time, they were brutalized, sprayed with fire hoses and shot by police and/or national guardsmen, called in to back up police. There was absolutely no stated ambivalence on the part of police in their roles at that time. They freely backed injustice and violence over peace and reconciliation.

Today, the general attitude of police in many communities and especially on the state level here in Massachusetts is often entitled, rude and callous. It rivals the notorious behavior of Boston transit employees. This is a reversion to the old days, when police operated like other mafias with secrets kept and injustices performed with impunity. To the average citizen, this confirms popular, perhaps unfounded, suspicions of corruption and low intelligence in police work.

Several members of my family were police officers from the 1940s to the 1990s. Half a century. My own father, a policeman for nearly 40 years, while prone to Right Wing politics himself, was skeptical about the general quality of his fellow policemen. He often observed that the system did not reward the peaceful and the just. It rewarded the aggressive, corrupt and political (manipulative).

As I walk around Boston, I see idle police in police cars. When they see that I am noticing them, they usually shoot me a dirty look. I see police cars idling in front of convenience stores and donut shops, where no apparent criminal activity is afoot. I see people running red lights as I am in a cross walk. I see cars parked illegally on sidewalks and in public park areas. I see mouthy gangs of young people causing public disturbances with skateboards, as they overtly harass pedestrians and drivers.

When I do drive, I have trouble finding a handicap parking space when helping a friend who has a medallion, because cars without handicap medallions from out of state are often parked in handicap spaces. My own neighborhood has permit parking due to limited spaces for residents on the street, and no police enforcement ever occurs, unless the tow companies want to make money on street cleaning days. I see state police tapping away at computers in their air conditioned cars, luxury by any standard, as traffic violators blithely run lights and ignore pedestrians. I also see state troopers standing around construction sites, while no visible work is being done and traffic is being bottled up for no apparent reason.

I see all these things daily, weekly. I also see the outcry in the media when a state trooper falls victim to a work-related injury. Yet, I seldom hear anything about cases of police corruption other than an initial blip. These cases are seldom highlighted or followed up in the press. Who is policing the police? Apparently nobody is.

I also hear the excuse that police budgets have been cut, that there are not enough police. Well, if there are not enough police, why do I see local police and state police taking so many extra details at construction sites? These details take their energy and availability away from the actual work of policing. I may add that police at construction sites do no policing. As an avid pedestrian, I have risked life and limb in construction areas where I have been forced to walk in a busy street without the least care or concern of a policeman staring at me from yards away. In fact, in some instances, I have been yelled at by a detail policeman for practicing my right of way as a pedestrian.

If police want public will for better funding, I suggest they simply start doing a better job. Clean up gang crime. Crack down on drug-dealing taggers and hoodlums in the streets. Enforce traffic and parking laws. Make life safe for pedestrians on city streets. If police present themselves in public as hard-working, engaged citizens in an official capacity, rather than paramilitaries in the employment of politicians and business, they would gain greater respect and participation in law and order from their fellow citizens and taxpayers.

Cowardice

Nonviolence and universal human justice take great courage and sacrifice. Cowardice is taking the easy, most conventional course against one's higher instincts and ethics.

Why is an American president with unusually high popular approval and international enthusiasm waffling on bringing an end to our wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq? Where is his loyalty based? Is it based in the people who elected him? Or is it based in the political class to which he belongs? The same questions can be asked of the Congress and all politicians in America.

Why is America rated 13th in international quality-of-life polls? Why is the American middle class being reduced to poverty and high debt to the wealthy who are 10% of the population? Why does the American government refuse to provide affordable health care to all its citizens?

Look to the banks. Look to the insurance companies. Look to the corporations in the energy and military-supply sectors. Look to the private contractors in the war zones.

Has cowardice led the leaders of America to bow to greed and corruption?

Politicians

The recent death of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts gave the awake observer some tremendous insights into politics, government as we know it, and politicians. The mindful and truthful have been testifying against politics, government and politicians since these phenomena were invented. And King Solomon would again shake his head and shrug if he were alive today. Nothing new under the Sun.

At a time when politicians in the majority are taking bribes (they call these 'campaign contributions') from the private health insurance industry to keep the American people slaves to premiums which support a Byzantine insurance bureaucracy, we have heard somber, solemn and totally hypocritical eulogies about the one Senator in Congress who has consistently supported universal health care with no buts or ifs.

'That's the way our system works, ' I have heard them say in defense of their hypocrisy and corruption. They speak of the interests of corporations as though they were of equal moral and ethical merit as the interests of the population, The People. This is not only lying. It is unconstitutional. We are supposed to be a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people. Corporations are not people. CEOs and lobbyists are people, but they are an infinitesimal minority of the people. Why are their interests being held above those of all the people?

Most troubling to me is the lack of counterpoint coming from the Kennedys themselves. In order to provide themselves the glory of a state funeral, it appeared, they have allowed the most despicable celebrities of the political class to jump on the funeral publicity train. The very people who have plotted to defeat the central pillar of Edward Kennedy's career, universal health care, rushed to fill well positioned church pews in Boston.

Death is not negotiable. It has no nuance. It is not debatable. It has no Right or Left. And neither does Truth.

If Americans could grasp and internalize their mortality, stripped of all the opiates of religion, plastic surgery, hormone enhancement, and television, perhaps they would demand Truth from their politicians. Perhaps they would demand that a Truthful legacy be granted to honor a man of the caliber of Senator Kennedy. Perhaps they would demand basic human rights, like health care, for all Americans and all the people in the world.

Messages

A wise man once told me, when I was a child, that the truth lies in what people do, as opposed to what they say. When I watch the proceedings in Washington, DC, in this inaugural season, I see politicians doing the same old things while they are voicing a need for change.

The country is in shambles, largely due to politicians, who ripped the guts out of government watch-dogs in the last 8 years. Where is the behavior of change in the new politicians. the Obama politicians? I cannot see change in their behavior. Not yet, at least.

I may be criticized for being skeptical or impatient or cynical. I may be all of these. However, I was also skeptical, impatient and enraged, when the Bush fascists stole the election of 2000 and behaved as impeccable patriots. That bunch turned out to be mass murderers of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, shameless torturers and invaders of the privacy of all Americans. And the populace of America, by and large, just watched or looked the other way.

I want those Americans who demand change, expect change, have been promised change to stand up to these new politicians. I want to see those Americans walk the walk. And, if they do not get change, I challenge them to return to Washington, DC, to demonstrate, instead of celebrate. This age of mass distraction by the media must end for true change to begin.

Politics

We are on the verge of a political season of promises, dirty tricks, celebrity worship and unrealistic expectations. The party conventions will be held later this month in the US.

Politicians, like religious leaders, often present their own compulsion for fame and power as selfless compassion in order to win votes. I am sure that some of them believe their own myths. However, someone committed to practice understands that power corrupts. It distracts from the focus on personal responsibility and personal evolution toward compassion, humility, acceptance, and liberation from need and desire.

Administration of the basic infrastructure of society is necessary. Politicians are failures at this. One needs only look at the nearest bridge or highway. One needs only to walk along the shore of the nearest public beach of lake or ocean. One needs only to ride through the poorest neighborhood in any city.

Politicians ignore the one largest threat to planetary peace and well being. Totally. That is overpopulation, of course.

So, as part of my own practice, I stay informed about politics. However, I focus my energy upon my own responsibility and development. No matter who becomes president, senator, representative or selectman, I must live my life with open consciousness in order to evolve. To do otherwise is reactionary and delusional. If every adult simply lived in practice, based in responsible action and just cause, politics, as they now exist, would be unnecessary and obsolete.

We

We the people have allowed our planet to become our sewer. We the people have allowed corporations and corrupt politicians to tell us that evil is good. We the people have killed and plundered in the Middle East, in Viet Nam, in Cambodia, in El Salvador. We the people foster the misconception that killing under the pretext of war is honorable, when we bow our heads to the military. We the people allow gang violence to exist in impoverished slums by allowing the politicians whom we pay to not do their jobs. We the people allow vandals to deface and destroy public accommodations and private property by not holding the parents of these vandals and negligent police responsible. We the people encourage overpopulation, poverty and stupidity by supporting the folly of reproductive rights without reproductive responsibility. We the people are the cause. We the people are the only solution through practice and right action.