What are we here for?

Over a million different species have been catalogued, with millions more to come, scientists say. Millions. The earth that we call home is billions of years old. Billions. Earth is part of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Many, many billions. With numbers this high, it is exceedingly narcissistic to think that human beings are more special than any other being. What we do with our lives ultimately does not matter, if you think about the brief time that we do have. I don’t want to come off as being Nihilistic here. I’m not saying that because we are such infinitesimal beings that we should do whatever we want to do, whenever we want to do it, since none of it matters anyway. I am merely pointing to the fact that seventy to one hundred years of time on this planet is going to go by exceedingly quick for all of us who live that long, and even quicker for those of us who won’t live that long. It is appropriate for us to consider what to do with the time that we have been given.

My job as school teacher is important, but so is the job of the postal worker, the garbage collector, the grocery store worker, the custodian, the maintenance operator. . .  We all need to do our part to make this fleeting experience worthwhile. Yet, worthwhile is such a relative term. What is worthwhile to me might be looked upon by another as being worthless, and vice versa. The way in which we treat others and the world around us needs to be remarkable. The purpose of this life is not to puff out our chests and think ourselves superior, nor is it to do whatever it takes to make a profit. Each one of the millions of catalogued species is connected; we breathe the same air, we rely on the same sun to provide us with warmth, we drink the same water that has been around since before the dinosaurs reigned. Our existence needs to be universally worthwhile in this sense, and I’ll adapt a line from Bill S. Preston here to illuminate the sentiment: we simply need to be excellent to each other. Surely, this sentiment cannot easily be refuted.

So, as I am awake and breathing, I will look to be worthwhile, valuable, to those beings around me. I may only be one of over seven billion people, who are only one of millions of species, hurtling around a bright star on the crust of a cosmically diminutive rock, tucked away in a cranny of the universe, but I choose to spend my days knowing with an impregnable confidence that my actions can positively affect this existence. I am here to promote and instill hope and positivity in each thought, and to send that perception into the world as a pandemic, like it should be. This is what I am here for.

What are you here for?

Boiling point

When I started this blog over a year ago, the purpose was to fulfill a goal of mine to write every day for a year. The blog helped me to sustain my momentum and to stay accountable. I have not written any new posts for this blog in a long time, and I feel the desire to recommit myself to the cause of researching current events and writing about them. This is strictly my own opinion, so if you happen to stumble upon this post, please take from it whatever you wish, and feel free to disagree. Rational and respectful discourse is something that is missing from modern society, so I welcome your input if you have the time to provide it!

There are many difficult stories to read in the news, and to comment on them all would be a full-time job. However, the following two stories deserve to be highlighted, due to the injustices that common people are suffering.

• Water has been shut off in thousands of homes in the city of Detroit due to unpaid water bills. So this is how Kevyn Orr is planning on getting Detroit out of the red in the books, by denying people the basic need of water. From the NY Times article mentioned below:

             Tyrone Travis, a former General Motors autoworker who owns his home, said he, too, faced service interruption because of a $700 bill. “I’m on a fixed income like a lot of Detroiters, and by the time I get through buying medicine, gas and a little food, I just don’t have it,” he said.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/us/protesters-picket-detroit-over-move-to-shut-off-water.html?_r=0

• Civilians living in the overcrowded Gaza Strip continue to be bombed by the Israeli military. The following is a story about four boys who were killed by two Israeli bombs while playing futbol on a Gazan beach. If you are in defense of Israel, imagine your child or a child you know and love being killed in a similar attack. You cannot in good conscious defend such a flawed rationale as what Israel is displaying in this time of atrocities.

http://socialistworker.org/2014/07/23/lives-stolen-as-they-played

What causes me to focus on these stories is the plight of the common man. The city of Detroit was once a proud place of residence for nearly two million people (the peak of 1.8 million residents occurring in 1950). In the decades since, the population has plummeted, and some of the causes have been the decline of the U.S. auto industry, urban flight, a rising unemployment rate, and a notorious crime rate. People in Detroit who are lucky enough to have jobs face a similar situation to the aforementioned Tyrone Travis. When Miguel Cabrera makes nearly $50,000 for the Detroit Tigers every time he steps into the batters box, it provides for the most apt juxtaposition of the difference between the common man and the affluent man in the Detroit area. (This is not to say that Cabrera is to be faulted for this. He merely accepted a contract offer.)

The current, but long-withstanding, conflict between Israel and Gaza highlights the ugly side of human nature. There has been constant struggle for cultural supremacy and occupation on this tiny strip of land, and from the looks of it right now, the struggle will continue indefinitely. The current population of Gaza, like Detroit’s peak in 1950, is 1.8 million people, yet there are only 139 square miles in Gaza, making its population per square mile come in at over 13,000 (by comparison, I live in Wyoming, where the population density is under six people per square mile). So, when Israel decides to drop bombs anywhere in the Gaza Strip, there is a potential for a great number of civilians to be killed as a result. The historic fighting between Israel and Gaza puts the common man right in the middle of the skirmish, and as of this sentence being written past 1:00 on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014, 687 Palestinians have died, compared with 35 Israelis. Schools, mosques, and hospitals are some of the targets of Israeli bombs, giving the common man nowhere to turn for a safe haven.

I can sense that around the world, people are reaching their personal boiling point. Wealthy people are prospering at unseen rates, and everyone else is left to fend for themselves. The widespread injustice that is taking place creates an atmosphere of a budding revolution that seeks to take the power back from the hands of the rich and powerful.

Senator Warren, you are making a wonderful impact

Aside from a ridiculously small number of people, politicians everywhere receive my steadfast ire. The goal of politics as it is today seems vastly different than it was in Aristotle’s day, when the term was created. In my view, modern-day politics is a race to see who can attain the most power. Look at the two major political parties in the United States as a perfect example. Both the Donkey Clan and the Elephant Group will make promises that will positively effect a majority of the populace in order to get elected. Yet when it comes to fulfilling those promises once in office, both groups renege; instead, the policy decisions that are made line the pockets of the politicians or the lobbying groups who control them. Regardless of which of the two main political parties wins the presidency, the common people in this country are the ones who will be worse off because of it. Democrats and Republicans are part of the same corrupt over-arching organization.

One person who seems to fit into the ridiculously small number of politicians who is making a positive affect on the common U.S. citizen is Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is in her first term, yet she has shown more of a backbone in sticking up for what is just than some members of Congress have shown in decades of “service.” Senator Warren has already challenged the Senate Banking Committee to prosecute the big banks that took bailout money and yet are repeating the same mistakes; she questioned the practices of the Food and Drug Administration in allowing tainted pharmaceuticals to hit the market; now she has brought up the potential doubling of interest rates on student loans, saying that students should be given the same interest rate that big banks get when they borrow money from the Fed (0.75%). There is a sincerity in her actions right now that is exceedingly admirable.

The cynic in me says that Senator Warren will succumb to outside pressure. Every member of Congress has done the same thing. However, my hope is that this is a politician who is smart enough to play the game and then come in like a wrecking ball and destroy the current power structure once in the Oval Office. I know that this is quite a lot to expect, but I can definitely see her attaining that post. As a middle class citizen who is paying off a large sum in student loans, I cannot help but support Senator Elizabeth Warren for her gumption. This is a politician who actually seems to be making good on her promises. Fancy that.

Becoming my father

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

-Mark Twain

I have been told repeatedly throughout my twenty-eight years that I look just like my father. For the first, oh, twenty-three of those years, I would brush off the comment with anger in my voice. It’s not that I was ashamed or angry that I looked like my father, it was simply that I wanted to be a completely unique person (which is probably why I dressed myself each day from the ages of three to seven in knee-high socks, cowboy boots, shorts, a button-up shirt, suspenders, and a bow-tie). I have always wanted to be an individual in every sense of the word, and when someone would tell me that I either looked or acted just like my dad, it seemed to jar my aspirations of being an individual. Dad would look at me from time to time, point to his face, and say, “This is your future.” Again, the desire to cut my own path in this life was threatened by mere words.

The quote by Mark Twain mentioned above has had a constant presence in the Whitton household. Dad had the quote framed and it hung on various spots of the walls in the Evergreen house. I can remember reading it over and over without understanding what it meant. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I caught the tongue-in-cheek presentation of the quote. The dad was not the one who had lessened his ignorance; the twenty-one year old was. In that moment, I had to chuckle.

I cringe when I think about my previous reaction to people saying that I resemble my father. How I was not over-the-top excited to be compared to such a remarkable human being is dumbfounding. I can blame my rampant individualism or my teenage angst, but the excuses do not hold even the smallest quantity of merit. Without a shred of doubt, my father is the person whom I want to become. His generosity, compassion, optimism, and above all, his obligation to fairness, have all been modeled to me every day in my twenty-eight years. I am proud to say that I am becoming my father. There is no one else whom I would rather be.

Growing up a devout sports fan, when people would ask me who my heroes were, I would state that Barry Sanders and Steve Yzerman were my heroes. While these two gentlemen are most definitely good people, they are not my heroes. My dad is my hero.

Thanks to you, Dad, my future looks bright.

Laughing out loud on a Sunday morning

My sweet wife Tami is asleep, which is why I feel bad for laughing so much and so loudly this morning. I have been watching these hilarious video shorts called ‘Kid Snippets,’ in which adults act out conversations had amongst kids, and my sides are aching due to a high volume of laughter. You have to watch these videos, as they are righteously funny. This video is about teaching subtraction, but there are dozens of videos available to watch.

My goodness, what a great way to start a Sunday!

The huge mistake in capitalist thought

capital: wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing

With this definition in mind, the goal of capitalism is to accumulate wealth, is it not? I am sure that more practiced players in the game of semantics could argue me out of this point, but for the purpose of this post, let’s assume that the capitalist system exists to perpetuate wealth among individuals, companies, or organizations.

If the purpose of capitalism is to gain wealth, then inevitably there will be some deceitful ways of acquiring capital. After all, a capitalist is encouraged to make money wherever possible (if you happen to be a devout capitalist and disagree with this statement, then I will welcome a friendly discourse on this matter). As long as the bottom line is showing a gain in the profit margin, then the ways in which money is made are largely irrelevant. Look at the disaster in Bangladesh as a prime example. Over a thousand impoverished workers died a horrific and completely avoidable death due to the incessant need of the business owners to make money. Then you can think about companies that produce weaponry intended to end a mass amount of lives (in the name of freedom and prosperity for a small section of the world’s populace, of course). Then of course you can bring up the companies that contribute to making the earth bald before her time (a phrase borrowed from H.D. Thoreau) in the interest of making profit. These examples simply scratch the surface of the detrimental ways in which capital is gained by the faithful servants of the capitalist system.

I must now direct your attention to the amount of profit that is seen as a result of the Congressional practice of setting the interest rate on federal student loans. The following information has been reported on by Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post (the link to his article will appear below). In this year alone, the United States government stands to make $51 billion on existing student loans for higher education. That number is roughly equivalent to the combined profit that the four largest U.S. banks (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo) reported last year, is more profit than what was made by each of the two most profitable oil companies (Exxon Mobil and Chevron) last year, and is ten billion dollars higher than the Apple corporation’s bottom line in 2012.

During election season, the politicians who are responsible for the interest rates of student loans will say that this country needs to invest in the future. Well, Congressional leaders, young people are the future of this or any country. Instead of putting eager students in a system that saddles them with debt, invest in them! Give them an interest rate that is manageable, not miserable. It is the upcoming generations that will have to literally pay for the actions of the current political scene. Student loans are second only to home mortgages in the realm of household debt. With this type of debt, how will college graduates save money for a car, a house, or a retirement, when they have a large monthly payment that applies mainly to the interest of their federal student loans? This is such a folly in the capitalist mantra. I am speaking directly to the capitalist when I say: if you are so quick to make money wherever you can, then by making every class but the business class broke and disheartened, you are not only hurting your potential earnings, but you are destroying a society that has the potential to live well within its means.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/obama-student-loans-policy-profit_n_3276428.html

A plea of insanity

The insanity plea doesn’t make any sense. Every person who kills someone else, or kills a dozen people in the case of James Holmes, is undeniably insane. I hate that our court system now accepts the insanity plea as a way to be able to serve time in a psych ward instead of a federal penitentiary. Klebold, Harris, Lanza, Holmes – these guys were all insane. The first three killed themselves after taking the lives of innocent students. I am not a typical participant in death penalty discussions, but I have to speak up in defense of a public hanging of Holmes. Maybe that gruesome image would prevent other shootings (though it seems almost impossible that it would).

It was all worth the effort

Yesterday marked the 365th consecutive day that I wrote down my thoughts in some form. On May 12, 2012, I wrote down in a spiral notebook that I wanted to fulfill a goal of writing each day for one whole year. For the first two-thirds of the year, I wrote down my thoughts on life in that spiral notebook. For the last third of the year, when I felt my stamina wavering, I started this blog to hold myself accountable to finishing this writing project. This is now the 366th consecutive day that I have written, and I am proud of myself for fulfilling my goal.

Now that my writing project is complete, I will focus more on other goals that I want to accomplish in the next year. Using this blog was vital to finishing my goal, and I am fortunate to have stumbled upon the idea to start this up. I now need to go back through what I wrote because if felt like there were some days in which I was grasping for any topic that had enough substance to write a few hundred words about. I am not proud of each day’s writing, but I am pleased that I was able to put together some intelligible sentences about various topics for the past year. Good writing is difficult to produce.

I am already about two months in one my second year-long goal: not to purchase any candy for myself. I have a substantial sweet-tooth, and I feel like if I want to have my teeth for the next fifty years, I need to cut back on the sweets. I am doing great so far, though I have replaced buying candy with making my own treats; now I have to at least put in a little more effort than swiping a card to provide a fix for a craving of sweets. Another goal that I have is to work on two book ideas. The first is a children’s book that I’ve had an idea for for about five years now about a kindergarten-aged boy who is short for his age and misses out on a number of exciting events because he can’t see over people who are situated in front of him. The second is a young adult novel about a society humming along smoothly until a group of people realize that “the way things are is not enough.” This second idea would be my attempt at writing an Animal Farm-type book that could reach a multitude of audiences while still having a cynical view of society as its main theme.

Anyway, if you are someone who has read even one of these posts, thank you for helping me finish out this writing project in honor of James C. Whitton. There were a lot of days in which I felt like I was writing gibberish, or scrambling at ten o’clock at night to find a topic to write about to meet my goal, but it was all worth the effort.

Let mothers rule the world

I want you to envision a world in which mothers were the rulers. Instead of having bank executives and defense contractors call the shots, moms would have final say. This world would look drastically different:

• There would be no need for austerity programs. Moms would demand that people help each other out in tough times with a system of bartering.
• Poaching would not exist. What mother would allow someone to purposely kill an animal because of its hide or its horns? Offenders would be forced to help out nature in various ways until their horrible deeds were at least considered to be forgiven.
• Gun control would be a laughable notion. Guns would exist for one reason: to defend the life of an innocent being in the face of extreme danger.
• Bloated military budgets around the world would literally be a thing of the past. I’m not even sure that militaries would exist anymore.
• No one would work overtime unless it was absolutely imperative to improve the lives of others.
• Companies would be forced to offer at least twelve weeks of maternity and paternity leave.
• Genetically modified foods would be forever banned. Food needs to be healthy, and all-natural, right Mom?
• The salaries of CEOs would be capped because a mother would institute a fair working environment for everyone.
• People would stay home on days when inclement weather makes travel unsafe. There’s no need to risk your life; stay at home and spend time with your family.

There are thousands of other improvements that would certainly be made if mothers ruled the world. Most importantly, this world would be infinitely more loving and peaceful if mothers ran the show.

Mothers everywhere – you are the real reason why life exists. Therefore, you should be in charge. The fate of this world should be placed in your hands; not the hands of men, the earning potential of corporations, or the incredible advances of technology. Life will not truly flourish until you are gently guiding the pace of humanity. I hope that this day comes before the end of my days.

Privatizing prisons

Though the United States has five percent of the world’s population, we house twenty-five percent of the world’s prison populace. This is a staggering figure, and the reason for this anomaly is the rise of for-profit and corporate-run prisons in this country.

China and India both have over a billion people living within their respective borders. China has four people to every person in the States, and India is not far behind with over 800 million more people than the U.S. population. If I were teaching a math lesson to my fourth graders on probability, I would say that the probability of the U.S. having a greater number of prisoners than that of China and India combined would be extremely unlikely, yet this is the truth.

The GEO group is a billion dollar private prison company, and it states on the company website, under the Who We Are tab,

The GEO Group is the world’s leading provider of correctional and detention management and community reentry services to federal, state and local government agencies. With operations in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; GEO offers a diversified array of turnkey services which include design, construction, financing, and operations. Our unique approach allows GEO to provide high-quality and cost-effective services with state-of-the-art designs, innovative programs and ground-breaking treatment approach.

This neo-conservative approach to the prison system seeks a perpetuation of high-levels of incarceration around the country, while also lobbying politicians to avoid passing laws that might reduce the current levels of inmates. Dina Rasor has written an article that details the thought process of the GEO group’s management team, and provides an excerpt from the group’s 2011 annual report:

In particular, the demand for our correctional and detention facilities and services and BI’s [a prison industry company Geo acquired in 2011] services could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws. For example, any changes with respect to the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Similarly, reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities. Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us.

This is a reprehensible and sinister approach to money-making. There is no reason for companies like this to exist. The shareholders of this company make a pretty penny on each bed that is filled, and the company is so entrenched in the lobbying system that buys Congressional approval that it will take a drastic shift in the overall business model in the States to overthrow such a ruthless corporation. I only hope that I will be around to see the demise of such an unjust system.