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It’s hard to speak your mind because you don’t want to hurt anyone.

That’s the main thing, I find. Don’t want to hurt oneself either, of course, but that’s not very likely in a halfway reasonable society like ours.

But the biggest things on your mind tend to be the people you know and the experiences you have with them and the thoughts you have about all of that.

Thoughts that you might not want them to hear about.

So you have to be anonymous.

And that’s not easy.

I was feeling really down.  Sick.  Sad. Depressed.

Because my child just doesn’t want to do anything.  Nothing.  Not a thing.

Except play computer games.

But nothing else.  Then gets in trouble in school and gets suspended.  So he’s home all day, two days.

And won’t tell a convincing story about what transpired – and of course I don’t know, they system is that they decide everything themselves there and then and issue their ‘punishment’ which is usually avoidance of their responsibility and eviction of the child.

So one doesn’t know.

And – I have previous experience – if one seeks to ascertain facts and argue the merits of the perceived judgement – guilty or not guilty – and fitness of the punishment – one then gets into a fullscale confrontation with the establishment.

Teachers and administrators fiercely defending their actions and in fact personally affronted that you might question them.

There’s nothing to be gained.  It needs a radical shakeup.  As so much of the world.

Back to where I was:

So it is disturbing, his behaviour and his recent predicament.

The root (to me) problem becomes evidenced very clearly by his ‘I’ll clean up my room’  thing.

In order to get out from under he’s negotiating a deal.  Can he have his computer back if he ‘cleans up his room’?  That really just means gets all his clothing – mainly washing done for him by us and then dumped on his bed by his brother – off the bed and into his cupboards in some kind of tidy way.

This is typical of him.

He seeks always to cut deals that mean you pay for him doing what he should have done in the first place.

A bit like schools seeking to cut deals whereby if you do something then they’ll go back to doing what they should have done all along.

So I acquiesce and then proceeds two hours of frequent interruptions to the stage where I give up trying to do anything at all.

Every couple of minutes come and see how he’s progressing.  Look at this.  Look at that.  And he’s hardly progressing at all.

And it becomes evident that his heart is not in it.  It becomes evident the message has not gotten through.

He simply doesn’t want to do it.

He has no idea of helping, doing his party, being a member of the group.  Anything like that.

I can’t find the words to describe it but it simply becomes evident that the child is not developing the way one hopes, is facing entirely in the wrong direction, and one is unable to make any effective change in him.

That I simply can’t teach him.

That he’s not getting the message from me.

I might as well be talking to a brick wall for all the clever ploys I try, all the care and love I pour into the whole transaction – I might as well do nothing.

And it makes me sad.  So sad I almost feel despair.  I do feel despair.  I almost feel total despair.

The despair at this situation, this event, leaks into the rest of my life and I feel despair at everything, everything in my life, all aspects of it.

And amongst all this I find myself thinking ‘If only he’d want to do it!’

If only he would want to help,  to do his bit, to not cheat and lie, not deceive.

If only he would want to be what we want him to be.

Heartfelt cry from the innermost recesses of my mind as I sit there feeling like totally giving up.  I don’t want to do this I think.  I don’t want to be interrupted every ten minutes, or two minutes.  I don’t want to have to continually go over and over the arguments, the rationales, the reasons for modifying his behaviour the way we want.

I don’t want this.  Any of it.  I don’t want to have to deal with the child.

But I have to.  And my heart and soul are weary.  I so much want to just do my own thing.

And then suddenly I see it.

The similarity.    If only I would want to do it !  My life would be so much happier.

I should want to deal with all this.

Doubtless I’d get better results if I wanted to do it.

Just as the school would get better results if they wanted to do it.

But they of course have declared unambiguously that they don’t want to deal with.  “Get out”  is what they say to a child who doesn’t like being there, playing into the child’s hands.

“We won’t tolerate this”  they say, giving a fine example of tolerant loving behaviour.  Which of course is what they hypocritically demand of their students.

But back to the point, which is above and beyond and behind and other than ‘the schools’.

And which is very simple.  Indeed. We just have to want to do the ‘right thing’, don’t we?

Simple as that.

I think this interview with Noam Chomsky is very good, very important, very informative.

Particularly to me was his assessment of why the USA constantly demonises Iran.   It is always a mystery to me why America hates Russia and Iran so much.  To where they maintain a stream of disinformation, ridiculous lies, about those two countries.

In this case Noam says that Iran has a small defence budget – I find that very significanct – and its Defence philosophy is Defence.  Not Attack.

Despite what the USA would have us believe.  They’d have us believe that Iran seeks, like a slavering mad dog, to immediately launch an all out attack on Israel and I don’t know whatever else.

And Noam says the USA wants to be able to do what it does now: use force freely wherever it feels like within the Middle East.

Hmmm.   Has the ring of truth about it.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy

The whole globe seems to be backing America and it’s Trump – ordered missile strike against an Syrian airfield.

A strike totally against international law.

A contravention of international law that the USA frequently in the past has screamed about.

A strike that happened mere hours after the incident they claimed justified it.

The incident they claimed justified it being uninvestigated and unproven.

The very claimed incident being on the face of it ludicrous.

They claim a man who is winning a war and beginning to achieve some concerted action with a long time opponent suddenly attacked civilians in the worst possible way thereby destroying his rapprochement and jeopardising his winning.

An attack without any discernable military benefit to him.

It is a clear cut madness.

Yet the whole (western) world is backing the American story, ludicrous though it is.

And more:  they even call upon Russia to abandon its alliance with Syria.

Stupendous arrogance.

They have not consulted the Syrian people at all.  Not asked them anything.  What they thought the attack was.  What they wanted to do about it. Which government they want (they voted 80% for Assad).  Who they want for an ally – Russia or not.

The Syrian people are in fact the people almost completely destroyed by the machinations of the American state in recent years.

A million deaths in the Middle East I read recently.  Hard to believe.  Needs checking out.  But if it is true it is all attributable to the Americans, is it not?

12 million displaced persons.  The greatest refugee crisis ever known.  All attributable to the Americans.

Oh, no: to Daesh you say.  Daesh was invented, trained, paid for and operated by the Americans in the first place.

It is all a madness.

My child is being accused of being racist.

He’s too young and of such a nature that he’s incapable of being racist.

They say he called a black boy ‘black’.  Called him ‘ A black something’  – they don’t know what the ‘something’ was and they don’t care.  What they care about is that he called a black boy ‘black’.

Does this remind you of 1984?   ‘Newspeak’ ?

I have had a quite senior officer of the Department of Education insist to me that saying ‘black’ is offense and racist.

At the same time as admitting that it is not.

Am I joking?  Am I talking rubbish?  How could he possibly have claimed both propositions at once?  No one sane and sensible would do that, would they?

Oh yes he did.  I pointed to vast areas of Australia wherein one could front up to the bar and rub shoulders with black people – ‘blackfellers’ – and engage in conversation, banter or even argument with the terms ‘whitefeller’ and ‘blackfeller’, ‘white’ and ‘black’ (accompanied by all manner of other adjectives) will fly around freely with no one taking offence or recognising them as other than descriptive terms.

‘black’, of course, is a term that a certain section of the Australian populace has apparently chosen to adopt, proudly.  It seems in order to identify with a social movement largely represented in the United States of America where the world is largely seen in black and white terms  (that is black and white people)  and the blacks are always assumed to disadvantaged and innocent and suffering and whites are always assumed to be advantaged and guilty and causing suffering.

They choose to be ‘black’ and to identify with this attitude and yet cannot be called ‘black’?

What madness is this?

It is the madness of today.  Loosely categorised as the madness of ‘political correctness’,  I believe, often contracted to ‘pc’.

There is no end to it.  It is ubiquitous and iniquitous.

Very important in logic, in sense, in reason is the fact that ‘black’ is NOT a ‘race’.

Completely unimportant to these racists.  Completely.  What words really mean is as irrelevant to them as what effect words have really had or were intended to have.

Just as in logic the racists by definition are those who separate out the speakers of certain words and the people of certain colours and accuse them of being racist and of belonging to a race.

Calling ‘black’ a race.  Calling ‘white’ a race.  Calling you ‘racist’ because you say ‘black’.  Calling you a racist because of things you do or say or believe.  Always resorting to an accusation of racism.

What could possibly be more racist that seeing everything and everyone in racial terms?

Totally, entirely?

Even when they don’t apply ?

Even when the ‘race’  doesn’t exist?  There is no ‘black’ race.  There is no ‘white’ race.

Just the same as there is no ‘evil’ race and no ‘stupid’ race.

But within all races there are the stupidly evil.   That has always throughout the history of mankind been clear and here we see it again.

The cosmos makes jokes.  Was Orwell prescient?  Newspeak in his book  1984  – the language of Ingsoc,  the ‘English Socialist Party’ – is spoken in the country of Oceania and intent is that every member of the party be wholly converted to use of this language by 2050.

Where do we live, here in Australia?  Surely our population is not yet dumbed down enough to not know?  We live in Oceania.  This region of the world is officially Oceania.

This is Oceania.

2050 is the target date.  I’d say we’re well on track.

Well that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?  We’re into the end game now.

We’ve all learned a lot in the interim.  Unless we didn’t want to learn.

One of the things we ought to have learned is that Mecca is under the control of the Saudi family.

It is in Saudi Arabia.

So now we know why Mecca was not denied to Daesh.

Saudi Arabia IS Daesh.

This is an awful fact.  Ignored, overlooked, hidden, unattended.

And now Donald Trump, brash, blundering, unskilled, big mouthed, meaning well unafraid Donal Trump is doing what?  A few short weeks after becoming President?

Embracing the Saudi family.  Almost his first major public event.

So that’s that.

Why don’t we get Saudi Arabia to deny Daesh terrorists access to Mecca?

As one of the five pillars of Islam every able bodied Muslim is obliged to make the pilgrimage at least once in his life.

Deny them this. See how they like that.

Our civilisation is in desperate peril and the reason is the lack of capitalised proper nouns.

Of a certain kind:  Truth. Honesty. Courage. Fortitude. Integrity. Probity. Wisdom. Justice. Temperance. Mercy.

and on and on…

In the past they would be written with a capital letter as the first letter wherever they occurred in a sentence.

Now they are hardly ever written, much less written with a capital.

Never written with a capital.

Which says  volumes about the nature of our society, our civilisation.

Disparaging volumes.

And I think the root cause of this can be traced far back. Back to the spinning jenny.  Or the dawn of the industrial revolution.

For before machines man’s business and man’s war was conducted man-to-man and man-to-nature.

Either confrontation frequently called for the display of some of these capitalised proper nouns.

They came to be happily capitalised because people gave them credence, recognised their worth, their import.

Back in those days something and (nowadays) trivial as a bad tooth could be the cause for unmitigated agony until the nerve rotted and died. Courage. Fortitude. Good Heart.  We’re much needed. Were the only medicine.

Back in those days men met on the field of battle even more frequently than today, believe it or not.  Apparently armed conflicts have actually declined.

And in those days when they met, they met, face to face.  In a melee. In the real world with all its unfairness.  A small man may easily find himself facing a very large man, mightn’t he?  A single man find himself surrounded.  A swordsman facing a pikeman – two pikemen?

War was terrible war.  Courage was all important.  ALL.

Children from the cradle were educated in the importance of these ‘virtues’ or necessary strengths or abilities or attitudes.

Out of that ‘rotten’ ground of warring primitive people without medical knowledge or aid, the majority embedded in a pyramid social structure that made them more or less slaves – out of that living hell grew notions of ‘Justice’, ‘Strength’ , ‘Courage’ etc…

They grew because they were so  blindingly obvious of importance.

The notion of ‘Love’ even grew.

Come the Middle Ages Courtly Love and Knightly Behaviour became widely known, accepted, admired, emulated.

Now that ground has gone.

That fertile soil.  That bed of disease, dirt, oppression, savagery, man and women alike thrown onto their own inner resources throughout their lives.

A life wherein you might well wish to believe in a benevolent god who would come and help you or at least direct you on a safe path.

So human.

Humans in peril.  Humans stressed and tormented.  Coming to know, to recognise, to admit and value those human qualities that helped them when there was not other help.

Humanity coming to know humanity.

It was going well.

A plant of knowledge grew and has grown to this day.  That plant helped to give birth to everything we have today.

Underneath our laws and systems and whole social organisation lies those understandings of human necessary qualities that were forged back in those primitive days.

But the impetus has gone.

The past is now too far away.

Too ‘other’.  A past without machines is too ‘other worldly’.  It doesn’t ring true.  It seems to have no relevance to today.

So now human beings are born into a milieu that  has to cognisance of these things.  A world that knows them not. Values them not.

A world that doesn’t teach them.

You can’t look at a printed page today and see ‘Courage’ in the body of the text, mid sentence, capitalised.

Nor ‘Honesty’, nor ‘Truth’, nor ‘Sacrifice’, nor ‘Love’.

No human virtue proper nouns are capitalised any more.

For they are not valued any more.

And so our children grow in the absence of any human values.

‘Grow up and educate yourself and get a good job’ is the sum of all their education.

The same advice could be given to a drone, a machine, a clone, a robot.

An example: how many teachers would even be aware of the existence of Kipling’s ‘If’ ?

Then how many teachers could help a boy become a Man?

We probably desperately need some Aboriginal Culture everywhere in the Western World.  Australia, USA, UK, Europe, everywhere..

But what chance of getting any?

None.  Why? Because those who pretend to be supporters of Aboriginal Culture are the very ones busiest at destroying it.

How so?

Because they define ‘Culture’ as ‘Art’, in the main.  They have the swanky,  posh, narrow definition of Culture.

Being ‘Cultured People’ themselves they profess high minded ideas and ideals, appreciate ‘good’ music, fine wines and literature.. etc.

All of which they call ‘Culture’.

So they encourage Aborigines to do dot painting and the performing arts and claim that is ‘preserving their culture’ where it is actually doing nothing of the sort.

It is ignoring their culture and substituting a pale and foreign imitation.

The ‘Culture’ of a people is everything they do.  Everything.  And most particularly those things they mainly do, most commonly do, that are in common with them all.

Not the few fancy especially marvellous things they may do here or there in some field or other but that which is most normal, most usual.

So that there are savage warlike cultures.  Peaceful nomadic cultures.  Habitually loving cultures, even, I think.

And there’s our culture which is characterised by love of money and slavish devotion to work.  We are like nothing more than worker ants, quite clearly.

Now what’s so good about Aboriginal Culture that we might need some of it?

Well they had a few things that never get a mention but which are of immense significance:

.  Consensus rather than living by edict from rulers.

.  Children lived with the whole people all the time including at work.. complete assimilation.

.  Living to live and be happy rather than living to pay off the original debt, so to speak, which is what we do.

.  Feeling they had a right to be alive and a right to have somewhere to live.

.  Feeling they belonged in a social group.

.  Letting children alone to be children until after about 10 years old.

. Living without clock driven schedules.

. Living without neurotic ‘work ethic’.

. Punishments are group decisions, immediate and public.

and there’s doubtless many others but these spring readily to mind even for someone as non-academic as myself.

All these things are just part of original mankind – which is really what we are.  It is our innate nature.  You could say it is what is ‘meant’ for us.

But we have come to this place where we believe and live according to these ideas:

. We have no right to a home unless we buy one – and then we must pay continually or lose it.

. Our primary purpose is to be good money earners.  To teach this to our children, etc.

. All decisions are always made by individuals or small groups ‘at the top’ and it is for those beneath them to obey.

. Children must be educated (read ‘indoctrinated’, ‘processed’, ‘habituated’) from the earliest age.

. Punishments can be as slow as decades in arriving, have no connection with self or peers and are remote,  private, often – as in imprisoning.

. The work of the society though now risen to be the overriding raison d’etre of the society, is compartmentalised and kept away from all those not directly involved in it.  Most especially from the  young.

And so on.  The differences are obvious, glaring, huge and dramatic.

So our society today is riven by illnesses and ‘badnesses’ of all kinds most of which can be traced back to the very nature of our society which robs people of inclusion, of security of home, of belonging, of self understanding and expression, of all humanity.

So we get criminals and the psychologically disturbed.

People  born human and wanting mainly simply to be human but finding themselves in an increasingly inhuman world.

The strain cracks them.

The strain has cracked us all, for we’ve given  up, we’ve come to accept this situation as the norm, as the good, as the acceptable, as the last word, as the right.

The big problem is not the ‘badness’ or ‘wrongness’ or shortcomings of our culture, though that’s all bad enough.  The killer is that there is no escape.  There is no alternative.  Many, many, thousands and possibly millions chafe against the culture and have difficulties with it and suffer from the interaction and would dearly like to find an escape.

But the culture will not let them go.   There is no alternative.

Well on the way to improving our culture and incorporating some of the features we’ve lost and removing some of the features we ought never to have included we could well do to allow ‘escapes’, ‘alternatives’,  areas where people can live in different ways according to different cultural patterns.

We currently (in Australia) have aboriginal lands where this could happen. Ironically it doesn’t happen right now even with the aboriginal people who still live on those lands.

That’s because they’ve been so successfully brainwashed, programmed, indoctrinated, deceived.  They have lost their culture already, following the lead of those who profess to care for them but who really are simply trying to absorb them into our culture and get them to leave everything of their own culture behind, outside.

They are asked to ape, adopt, submit to everything about our culture and to pick up bark paintings, dot painting, basket weaving,  western ‘arts’ in order to imagine they are preserving their own culture.

Send your tiny kids to school,  watch the clock, let money and work be your god,  bow to the mighty,  forget any idea of a natural ‘right’ to existence….   just paint the dots.

It is a joke. An awful joke.

Why don’t the live on their lands and follow their own culture?

Because their own culture has no knowledge of technology and finance and gangs of thousands predictably turning up for work and education. You can also find some great resources about business at globalgurus.org.

They want many of the things we have, understandably.

And they don’t know how to get them except by following our example into our worker bee inhuman slavery.

So they try to do that.  With more or less success.

And in doing it, their eyes fixed on the bright shining trinkets and rewards of our society and led by the high minded ‘cultured’ people of our society, they lose everything of value in their own traditional culture.

No one points that out to them.

They don’t think they have anything of value in their traditional culture, especially when it comes to their faith, except perhaps dances and myths. However, some may wonder, ‘Why can not baptists dance?’ You can also check out this article for more insights.

They are not accustomed to think in a way that would reveal this truth to them.  Not surprising, we ourselves are not accustomed to think in a way that would reveal our truth to us about the paucity, the human paucity, of our civilisation.

They don’t preserve what is valuable because they don’t know it is valuable.

They could find a way to preserve all those valuable traditional features and  yet still gain access to the valuable things from our society.   They could indeed.

And if they did that they’d be an example and a hope to the entire world.