Critical Mass

Ideas grow, like other living things. Vulnerable at first, an idea, sometimes slowly sometimes quickly (and sometimes not at all), then takes on dimension and strength until it attains maturity at which point it becomes a point of common wisdom. From then forward, the idea functions like gunpowder awaiting a spark or like the night sky awaiting the sun's appearance. Choose your simile.

One idea that has now entered its stage of maturity could be formulated as follows: The people of the United States are no longer willing to tolerate the arrangement of American society in which an ignorant but vocal minority obstructs the necessary turning of American society toward peace, justice, equality, compassion and cooperation.


The question is now just this: What steps are to be taken to harness this nearly universally held sentiment and produce the desired transformation of our social arrangement? Mounting a movement to rewrite the American Constitution or specific laws is not the answer for the moronic minority would have the same strangle-hold on that process as it does on the current governmental dynamic. What, then, is the alternative?


One model for such a transformation of society is to be found in Germany, where impoverished regions have introduced their own currencies, local alternatives to the euro. Much of the business activity in these regions is conducted in the local currency which attracts the participation of individuals and businesses not only because the currency supports local commerce only but also by virtue of the fact that a percentage of the total goes to local schools, public services and businesses that are deemed to contribute to the general welfare. 

What will be needed in order to make this sort of economic secession succeed in the United States is the morality-based equivalent of an Emily's list. 

The Disappearing Male Student

Among the less discussed reasons for men graduating in fewer numbers than women is the unfavorable treatment received by boys in primary and secondary schools in the United States. Boys tend to need to learn actively, by playing and creating and trying things out. Boys learn through energetic engagement. Much to their misfortune, misbehavior is defined in the educational context as just that: energetic engagement. Now there are exceptions of course; some lucky boys possess the constitution required in most of our classrooms -- immobility and receptivity being the two prized modes of behavior -- and, ironically, it is the presence in the classroom of these few exceptional boys -- the inevitable teachers' favorites -- which provides the justification for demanding such an attitude from all boys. If those two exceptionally mature and intellectually precocious boys up there in the front row are prospering in my classroom, then there is something wrong with the other 12 boys (as well as the 3 hopeless Chatty-Kathys) The preponderance of primary and secondary teachers are of course female, and this explains part of the issue. These women teach in a manner to which they responded positively when they were the age of their students. In addition, the development of one's gender identity advances to some degree as a process of reaction, of creating in oneself a contrasting set of behaviors and attitudes to that of the opposite gender. In the case of boys, they are identifying with the father figure and male figures in general while individuating from the mother and setting up distinctions between themselves and the female of the species, among whom their teachers. Indeed, male teachers tend to distinguish themselves from their female counterparts in that it is the male teachers who find a way to liberate male energy by offering the option of producing a video, growing a garden, allowing the class to redesign the classroom, to work in groups, to visit local institutions, to display mastery of material through skits, to chatter and laugh; in other words, to learn through activity rather than through sitting obediently in one place for hours.

SAVING FAITH

Remove Item D from the plastic wrap.

“Item D? Let’s see. Oh, here it is. The strand of beads. OK. And?”

HANG ITEM D AS SHOWN IN FIGURE 2.

“Like this?”

“Uh… I guess.”

“Let me see the picture.”

“Figure 2.”

“Oh, I see. Like this. Here. OK, step three?”

PLACE PALMS TOGETHER WITH FINGERS EXTENDED BEFORE YOUR HEART. 

“Palms… what?”

“A little higher.”

“Here?”

“Perfect.”

“Now what?”

STEP FOUR: CLOSE YOUR EYES.

“Okay.”

IMAGINE THE LORD FATHER.

“Huh?”

“Here.” Look. Figure five.”

“Let me see. Oh. Of course.”

“ Are you doing it?”

“Yeah. Next?”

IMAGINE THE LORD FATHER BEING TORTURED BECAUSE OF YOU. 

“Huh?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Is there a picture?”

“Yeah. Figure six.”

“Let me see…”

New Wave

Societal change rolls like ocean waves. Or something like that. There is a visible component, its surface, surging toward the shore, but underneath churns the outward-surging drag, and this second, nearly invisible force works to reverse the flow. In some cases, as any child who's stood hypnotized on the beach will tell you, the invisible backward pull overwhelms the visible surging, taking the whole of the wave under and out to the depths where its elements can be remixed and brought forth to roll again.

In my lifetime, the most startling instance of this watery dialectic occurred around the year 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. The election of the hyperconservative Reagan came on the heels of a fifteen to twenty years of surging in the opposite direction. Civil Rights, Vietnam, LSD, feminism and youth culture were some of the banners of that transformative reawakening of the American spirit. Had they asked any of us if an elderly, anti-civil rights, pro-dictator, chauvinist, anti-intellectual, uneducated, C.E.O.'s erotic dream come true, worst enemy of the common worker was electable in 1980, we would have laughed in your face. Our mistake was believing that a wave has only its visible force.

Patriotism

The less educated you are, the less you have mingled with people different from yourself and the less you read, the more likely it is that you will think your birthplace is the number one place of all to be from. If, in addition, you yourself have been humiliated in your youth, then you will easily accept that masculinity means intimidating the vulnerable and the more you will believe that visiting violence upon the those different from yourself will resolve your feelings of helpless rage.