AN IRRATIONAL IDEA - 2001

As prices rise and job availability decreases, competition frustration and fear are creating conditions that contribute to the cessation of positive growth in our nation. The much needed stimulation of growth toward an intelligently governed, peaceful and productive society capable of accommodation and enrichment of its populace at all ages and socioeconomic levels.

The family structures of our past that allowed for nurturing aspects of a supportive environment for multiple generations has deteriorated. These families of the past were present to provide enrichment to younger generations by example and in terms of a experientially developed responsibility of problem solving skills in a comparatively safe and supportive environment.

This encompassing familial support network having been lost or done away with on a large scale has produced generations of people who undauntedly take the reigns of business and government yet lack the appropriate balance of the fundamental self-image and self-esteem generating skills required to make life flourish positively and peacefully for themselves in a personal as well as professional nature. These inadequate skills, lack of confidence and inner values have manifest within the individual as a feeling of deep abiding fear and because we live the motions of a systematic denial of that fear and its surrounding inadequacy, the approach to life has become irrational and short sighted. Irrational in that the decisions are often based on emotional gratification and short term goals lacking the values that yield nurturing eventualities of present self and future upcoming generations.
Having become fearful and insight-deficient from lack of understanding and skills required to nurture children from a deep abiding self confidence based on personal experience of adequate nurturing, each generation subsequently increases and exacerbates this condition of insufficiency. Evidence of this growing inadequate state of fear is that children lacking proper nurturing and guidance feel alone and imperiled, and that is essentially what they are. This desperation is expressed as the growing tendency of youth to band together for support in gangs and other short-sighted dysfunctional relationships. Although misguided, these young people are naturally searching for acceptance and a sense of belonging to fill the emptiness that the extended family is not present to fill. A determination to not be like their inadequate non-nurturing parents arises, but having failed to gain appropriate skills and confidence, it becomes very difficult to find positive, constructive and productive avenues to express that determination. The fearful and angry situations these young people involve themselves in have become their only means of feeling something other than inadequate and desperately powerless.

In order to rebuild and correct this situation, young people need to learn skills of responsibility and problem solving. Before these can be learned in a balanced way, without emphasizing and reinforcing the feelings of inadequacy, a safe and caring environment must be established. This environment must be capable of experientially reconnecting them to a more real view of themselves wherein self-confidence can be generated. Further, it must provide a fertile soil in which new skills can grow and integrate with confidence, thus creating a new and enduring approach to life. With sufficient and balanced confidence and skills, a legacy is created that can domino into future generations. Not only can this eradicate formerly negative and desperate situations, but it can provide a real basis for hope of a constructive peace. Within the environs of that haven, it can begin to be understood that peace arises from inner understanding rather than from external control and governmental function. What formerly were personal, family-driven units in society, expressing their ideals as cooperation, abundance and responsible productivity that facilitated trade and prosperity, is now too often deteriorated. The thrust has been toward an impersonal, corporation-driven world, requiring survival-of-the-fittest attitudes and self-serving strategic profit mongering.

In general terms, there are four areas that need priority attention at local, national and global levels:

  1. Young people already grown and already potentially part of the work force and children-producing generation, need to be provided a safe, nurturing and continuing skill-learning environment.

  2. Older generations that produced these younger people need to be assisted in participating in their own rightful function of providing this.

  3. Families must be provided facilitation to assure them means to assist at all levels in bringing about this rebuilding and correction at the root level. This must include the uniting and reuniting of extended family and its potential for adequate functionality and coping to bring strength, coherence, reliability and appropriate ideology of necessary family hierarchy, sovereignty and loyalty in order to build functional units with which to comprise a nation.

  4. Corporations need to create the means and mechanisms by which to facilitate assisting families by working directly with them in providing training and expertise that distributes learning, prosperity and empowerment throughout the new system, with reasonable sharing and profits for corporation owners, existing employees, younger trainees and subsequently, their families. This needs to be extended to include the families of all owners and employees of the corporations while allowing redistribution of wealth toward more reasonable levels with less disparity between owners, executives, management, employees, younger trainees and their families. Cross training would increase, safeguarding both the corporations and those who individually work them. The focus must be moved from high profit and disparity to a focus on the fair and appropriate use of profit with a high priority on restoring and maintaining functional family units as building blocks strong enough to support the corporation and its workers. This would bring the corporations into a necessary and honored function of interfamily support and community, building out into an inter-corporation support and community. These functional, family-focused support systems, at their various levels of interaction, exchange and support, would effectively become the new focus of the nation. The nation, would likewise become a truly functional unit, which along with others, would comprise the world.

As this restorative cooperation progresses, fear and desperation begin to decrease, society at all levels becomes functional, rational, insightful and nurturing. Dysfunctional methods and approaches to life dwindle and disappear as the fear and desperation that created them are no longer so largely extant. The gangs and other relationships, no longer seen as either necessary or desirable by their participants, cease to be the incoherent societal units they once were any longer, because their deepest cry and need was both heard and responded to in adequately nurturing and non-controlling ways. The members of these groups themselves would find other, more productive ways to live.

In conjunction with the above mechanics of facilitating better global, functional nurturing, religious organizations can begin searching together for universal likenesses rather than for dividing differences. Understanding can be discovered and enhanced in utilizing inner work techniques as taught in Simplistic Meditation, the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), HIP, Non-Violent Communication and so on, wherein spirituality can be nurtured adequately regardless of religious traditions. Through understandings that are less mysterious, dogmatic and emotionally addictive, and more universally practical and applicable, religion can become more of a way to ritualize, habitualize, participate in the growth of one's own spiritual ideal, rather than being a dictatorial definer of spirituality. Such an atmosphere that treasures freedom, reasonableness and realistic humanness, and which guides from inwardly agreed-upon likenesses, would promote spiritual and religious activities that assist people to aspire to fairness and understanding rather than to control and conflict. This integration of personal, family, corporate, national, global, religious and spiritual goals, can promote practices that contribute to fairer and more workable morality. Such morality would agree with human nature and physiological development, and would take a more realistic view of sexual desire, behavior and necessary autonomy. Corporations and those of wealth throwing their money down for the poor is not enough. Passing laws to restore power to the people is not enough. It will require the effort of everyone in an integrated, cooperative effort over several generations. We must restore understanding, nurturing, trust, self-confidence, functionality, fairness and freedom. Work would be from within the individual, within the family, and throughout a supportive network of already-existing corporations (who have the means and whose owners need the benefits of the changes more than money). This would continue in an outward-spiraling, cooperative, global effort designed to establish functional, human and spiritual caring for all.

From the quark to the speck of star dust, from the tiny dew drop to the mighty ocean, from the rock to the mountain, from the peasant to the king, from the reprobate and incorrigible to the saint and ascended master, from the atheist in the void to the interdimensional living supernova some call God --- peace and understanding in freedom and prosperity --- the dawn of joy without fear. Just an irrational idea whose time has come.

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