In Sports: A enigmatic wonderment for the books:
I get ridiculed a lot for selecting Terrell 'The Terrible' Owens as one of my favorite sport figures. He currently is in second place on the NFL All-Time wide receivers number of touchdowns in a career. He is in the top five in most other important wide receiver categories. So, I assume his athletic accomplishments are beyond debate.
Many football sport commentators and analysts find Terrell to be unbearable, a disgrace to the game, and more than one have urged the Commissioner of Football to ban him from the game. They have probably calmed down a little bit, mostly out of fatigue, since the time they were at the height of their screaming fits. All this screaming caught my attention a few years ago and so, ever the inquisitive one, I looked further into the matter. I read his two books, I paid attention to everything said about him by his former coaches, his former teammates, and sought to find out who his closest friends were---that is often a clue about a person. The books were useful mostly in understanding the circumstances under which he spent his childhood. Terrell grew up in one of the poorest towns in Alabama virtually under house arrest by his grandmother. She kept telling him he was special and he was not going to get drawn into the kind of mentality and behavior other children in his neighborhood displayed. To say Terrell's world was small is to exaggerate the size of it. It was saturated with a 'us' vs 'them' mentality seeped in strong ethical terms: fair is fair, never lie, never back down when you are right, trust in God, others will always try to bring you down---but you bring them down. Early on he was skinny and shy, very shy, and other kids would beat him up for tattling on them. At first he ran home in tears to 'Grandma' but Grandma sent him back out to fight the best he could, to never give in to them---and he got pounded on a lot. No one who knew Terrell back on his high school or college teams can hardly remember him let alone comprehend how he could become the star and controversy he now is. He was the silent team nobody. While he went out for sports he was never a star or the starting wide receiver---until the starter got injured and then he did well. He developed his fitness and physique on his own. He kept his mouth shut and just listened to what coaches said to the starters. He was drafted by San Francisco 89th in the third round of the NFL draft. He played in the waning days of Jerry Rice and just watched Rice. Terrell spent all of his life, until a couple of years into being a Pro, just watching and listening. Like in a cocoon peering out at a mysterious world. Quiet as a mouse.
Who is to say why he suddenly became 'Terrell the Terrible' with the biggest smile when happy, the most frightening scowl when anyone got in his way, and a guy who loves a microphone and the stage. Steve Young, his former quarterback has said that if anyone crossed T.O. they were toast. When I looked for close friends---surprise, he had none. I guess this is not surprising because until the last couple of years he seldom talked to teammates, never hung with any of them after games or on the days off from practice. If anyone in life pulled themselves up by their own boot straps, Terrell did. He knows this, and this may be why he celebrates by himself, a one man celebration band. Maybe this is why Terrell doesn't take kindly to any coach, for some time now, telling him how to train, how to get in shape, how be a good wide receiver. It is like "I got to the top on my own, thank you, but I will stay on top on my own.' He trusts no one. He trusts his own physical training program, and feels he learned from Jerry Rice, the best source for knowledge about wide receiving. When his current Coach, Wade Phillips told reporters he doesn't control players, he assists them in becoming the best they can, it must have been music to Terrell's ears. No more "Stand up--sit down---turn right," etc. When his current owner spoke to him as some one who believed in him and respected Terrell's knowledge about his position, Terrell cried during their first face to face meeting. Terrell, in what seems out of character, at times will cry. He cries when anyone brings up his grandmother, and for one year the media loved to bring him on talk shows, bring up his grandmother and watch him cry (his grandmother has Alzheimer's disease).
To anyone who takes the time to understand Terrell's past, these media critics talk out of their ass, and are shamelessly hell bent on character assassination. Terrell is different that is what he is. Just different. He is an excellent citizen, never been in trouble with the law, stays in shape all year round, his teammates respect him even if they can't get close to him, no former coach ever bad mouths Terrell, no former quarterback with the exception of Donovan bad mouths him (I think he has stopped too), and thus these media commentators, by their total isolation from Terrell the person, ought to be ashamed of themselves. When the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies pulled the wool over Terrell's eyes with a 7 year contract worked out through an agent who Terrell just used because he was the first agent he ever had, the owner thought the matter was over---that the owner,' Mr. Slick', won, that Terrell lost, and the league agreed. A contract is a contract. Hundreds of contracts in the NFL are redone each year, the whole system of contracts in the NFL is a farce and rip-off on the fans and players. Owners can break a contract any time they feel like doing it. All the powerful forces, including vast legal teams, set out to teach Terrell a lesson. Terrell doesn't pretend to know much about many things. He knows football and he knows fair is fair. He does his job well, and his job is essentially all he concentrates on. If this is a crime, then so be it. He likes to brag, if that is a crime he is guilty; he likes the world to know when he scores a touchdown; if that is a crime he is guilty. His celebrations may be childish and not some people's cup of tea including myself, but that is no reason for him to be fined for pretending he is a sprinter or whatever other nonsense he does, since none of it is disrespectful to anyone. Certainly, if some players can leap into the stands after a touchdown, it seems Terrell can mimic this or that, and 'love me a little T.0' which demeans no one, just annoys his detractors.
The final straw which solidified my support for Terrell is just how effectively he tunes out all the hate-filled critics. He never attempts to answer them tit for tat. He shrugs it off as that is what they are paid to do---be critical---run their mouths. One does worry about Terrell's world and how he will survive without football. He is aging now, an aging bull, and his taunters are circling, waiting for the kill. I had said early on with Obama "Don't bet against Obama" and I feel the same way about Terrell, "Don't bet against Terrell". He has yet not to land on his feet. And I think that is great, for it is his detractors who deserve to end up on their ass.
Terrell's power to concentrate on himself, to better himself, to believe in himself and the things his grandmother taught him, to achieve success by being the best at what he does on the field---and all by himself---is what got him where he is today.
Terrell may be full of himself---he had to be---but to my knowledge he has never interfered with anyone else's attempts to be the best they can be on any team Terrell has ever been on. His former coaches never bad mouth Terrell including Andy Reid because the battles were always over football matters and winning. Anyone who has ever coached knows there are two kinds of pain in the asses to coach. Those who rarely do anything right and screw up because they don't listen; and those who raise hell over how to be better, how better to do things, and themselves come through when the chips are down and the game starts. You love those 'trouble makers', the team respects them, and the team wins. Terrell will never dance to those critics who demand how he should think, how he should talk, how his personality should be, how politically correct he should be, how he should relate to fellow teammates, and coaches, and fans, and oh just about anything else they have scripted in their minds. Good for Terrell. Most of us know when to pack it in, let 'city hall' win, let assaults from 'on high' change our 'dance'---preferring peace to endless mental stress. Terrell's greatest attribute is his ability to stand his ground, be immune from hostile verbiage, stand tall like a King Kong, roar like a lion, with the facial expressions of an attack dog, and simply refuse to budge, except to keep playing football at the same level. It is a wonderful, humorous show, with the fatcat fatheads getting 'splatted' one by one as he heads to the end zone in a different kind of 'smash mouth' game. When it is over, Terrell does what he always does after any kind of 'touchdown'---he flashes that biggest smile in the world and 'loves me a little T.O.' just like everything else in his life----all by himself.
Below are Terrell quotations, nothing intellectually heavy, but revealing as to where he came from, how he got to where he is at, and to me, if he wants to cheer and root for himself in a selfish way, well---I think he has earned the right to do so.
God may not be there when you want him but he is always on time.
I don't have to play football.
I feel like football players are overworked and underpaid compared to any other sports.
It doesn't matter what people say about me, I weather the storm.
Right is right and wrong is wrong.
This is God's world this is not the media's world.
“Get your popcorn ready, 'cause I'm gonna put on a show.”
“Like I always said, if I'm one of the top players in the game, pay me like I'm one of the top players in the game.”
The only people that really matter are the people that are in my inner circle.”
“Like my boy tells me; if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by golly, it is a rat.”
“When I'm around him, he tries to downplay it, like everything is cool, ... But I'm not sure it is.”
“I'm going to work with T.O. and only T.O.,”
Lessons T.O. says he learned from his grandmother (who wouldn't let him leave the yard except for school and later for sport practice---she didn't want Terrell to learn bad habits and ideas): "When I was growing up, my grandmother told me that people were going to talk about me and get in my business, and there was nothing I could do about this. They weren't going to understand my ways, so I should just accept it. You've got to be very strong, she insisted, and make your own decisions, because nobody else can do that for you. You've got to know the difference between right and wrong and always figure out which side of that line you're standing on. You've got to work very hard for everything because no one is going to give you anything. And you've got to tell the truth, even when it's uncomfortable, even when you don't want to. Lying isn't good for anyone or anything. And if you are going to tell the truth, she let me know, you'd better be prepared for the consequences."
I ran everywhere in the hot Alabama pre dawn fog, and it felt as if I could run forever. This was a great outlet for me, an escape into another place where I was in charge of my life and could push myself as far as I wanted to. The more I ran, the more I wanted to run and the more I wanted to see what I was capable of. I was putting on weight and adding strength to my legs and endurance to my lungs. My body was changing, and people were starting to look at me in a new way. As I ran, I saw the steam rising from the stacks at the Russell Mill, where my mom and my grandma were still working, and I told myself I didn't want to be stuck in there for the rest of my life with the other people in town. There had to be something more.
I can be moody and distant when I go deep inside myself
I've often wondered if I will ever be able to find a female who could understand and accept not only what I have to do to get ready to play football but how the game affects my personality. My intensity is something I was born with, and I can't get rid of it. Throughout the season, I ache with the desire to win, and I'm usually not lovey-dovey when I come home from practice or when I'm sore from the last game or focused on the next one. My family and my agent know this about me, and they've learned to leave me alone.
The older I've gotten, the more I've been surrounded by temptation, especially when I started to find success in pro football. Everywhere I turned, there was a chance to go astray, with drugs or women or booze or violence or bad investments or many other things. Whenever I was standing at the cross-roads, I thought about my grandmother, and she helped me through.
I knew that others on the team saw me as distant, but I didn't know what to do about it. Because of my background, it always had been hard for me to trust anybody or get close to outsiders. You want to be alone and by yourself, but people don't understand this. It's not that you don't like others, but we were raised in isolation, like we had a shield around us. You have to learn to come out of this and to interact with the world in a new way. it takes time to figure out who you really are.
Jerry Rice to T.O. "At some point, you're going to have to learn to be politically correct. YOu know, give in, and give 'em what they want. " T.O: "I have always had trouble with the idea of not speaking YOUR truth. There's no such thing as borderline lying for me. I'm not going to beat around the bush or tell you what you want to hear. I'm not a politician.
When the tide turns against you, there isn't much you can do except stand back and let it go until it runs out of steam. You can't explain yourself, because the public isn't interested in explanations. It's interested in venting its anger.
Stew was leaving for Atlanta, and I was so stunned that I couldn't do anything but sit in my room and think about how much I was going to miss him. I got fined for doing this, which was another joke. Somebody had to slap me with another fine because I was mourning the loss of the one coach who'd really had my back, George Stewart.
“If the truth needs to be told, then that's what I'll do, ... If he [Reid] wants to be a man about it and have me really go on the air and really tell the people what happened, then I can. It was a difference of opinion.”
“I think some people are kind of ticked off because I haven't really said much. They don't pay me to go in there and talk to everybody and be friendly to everybody. They paid me to play and they paid me to perform. That's what I've been going in there and doing.”
“on-the-field heroics will far outweigh any off-field criticism.”
“And I told him my name isn't Reid. My name is Owens. I'm not one of his kids. Don't tell me to shut up,”
“then he needs to get his sense of humor checked.”
“That's right. That's what I bring to the table, in case you somehow forgot.”
“As you get to know me, you kind of figure me out, that I'm not as probably as bad of a guy that I've been reported to be. I'm not that jerk.”
“This is a dirty business, that is why I go out and play with my heart.”
“I'm here in camp and that's all I can say.”
“Just because I don't talk to everybody, that's up to me,”
"I'll watch the highlights every now and then but, as far as watching the game, I feel like I am the game."
"But if you look at the big scheme of things, I have never failed, regardless of anything I have had to go through: from Dallas, to the sharpie, to me getting involved with a debate with my coach, a lot of people look to see me fail." -
"I have done a lot of good things off the field but I feel like in my heart I don't really have to publicize what I do for people because it is from my heart." -
"I feel like it was a little disrespectful but you know what I feel like, I have been successful, blessed and I keep my faith in God, man, and I just keep it moving." -
"I never had any run in with the law." -
"There has to be a beginning somewhere and my thing is that I am going to give it all I got."
"You have not seen my face go across the screen for any off the field problems, period." -
"Everything that I have done that the media sees as an obstacle, I have over come it."
"It doesn't matter what people say about me, I weather the storm." -
"Growing up as a little kid, I wasn't always this size. I got picked on a lot." -
"I may not say it all the time or I may not pray as much as I need to, but I am not forgetting where I came from and how I got to be where I am today."
"I have donated money to the kids overseas, the open hand project and the homeless." -
"I wrote the book not to prove people wrong but just to get the insight on who I am as a person." -
"I've only been on one vacation ever. I just went to Acapulco before training camp."
"That's right. That's what I bring to the table, in case you somehow forgot." -
"You can hate me all you want to, but you can't stop me."
"Yes, I am a narcissist. The best, too."
Exposure is exposure, whether it's good or bad. But you know what? You live and you learn, and I know who to trust and who not to trust. I'm in control of what I'm in control of, and that's me coming in here and being productive on the field. And as long as I'm keeping my nose clean and doing the right thing, then I'm OK.”
“I'm smart enough to know when I've done something wrong, but I don't understand this. Guys are beating their wives, getting DUIs and doing drugs, and I get national attention for a Sharpie? People are personally attacking me, calling me a classless asshole because I did something creative during a game. Why?”
The criticism that hurt me most is that I'm dishonoring the game, have no class, no respect. Who is Dennis Green to say that, when he couldn't control Randy Moss? I'm disrespecting the game? I'm not the one with the rap sheet. I've never taken a play off or not blocked. I guess walking off the ball and not blocking anyone like Randy is respecting the game, huh?”
Anytime I am on the field I expect to have an impact. I just don't foresee myself being a decoy. That is just like putting Shaq on the court and not giving him the ball.”
To his Offensive Coordinator during the contract dispute, during which Terrell would speak only to his Receivers Coach and the Head Coach, while Donovan could only speak to him through the Receivers Coach: "You don't speak to me unless I speak to you first". The fact that all the coaches and teammates, with precious few exceptions, at the time or after the time of the turmoil, all speak highly of Terrell kind of settles who was right on the particulars of the dispute. And this praise includes that Offensive Coordinator, Brad Childress---now the Coach of the Minnesota Vikings.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
ETHICS AS VEXATIOUS TRUTHS
Ethics As Vexatious Truths
For some time now I have believed that the basic understanding of right and wrong is, at this point in evolutionary time, an innate part of human nature. Practically everyone knows right from wrong anywhere on the globe. The problem is being willing to do right rather than wrong. It is the same conflict throughout human history: self-interest vs ethics.
I also have come to believe that all ethical decisions should be based on reason and logic and consequences. I have lost a lot of interest in ancient dogmas, written by humans, as being some sort of official Word from God. This does not detract at all from any of the wisdom found in the various scriptures.
It does seem, without any careful analysis on my part, that the most contented people seem to be the most ethical. And the most ethical are certainly not the religious right in any religion. Their notions are rarely generated from logic and reason, but from highly selective faith based religious dogma. And I have yet to see any groups of the religious right in any religion who come across as happy contented campers. Whatever it is their faith generates, it is not tolerance or understanding or cooperation, or any form of live and let live. They seem to always be angry and forever on some sort of crusade, always of course in God's name. I tend to see the religious right ranting against others of different hues with a Bible of some sort in one hand and some sort of patriotic flag in the other. It is almost like in the name of God they are free to make the lives of so many others difficult and miserable. And their faith based notions, in their own mind, are always right. I guess when logic and reason are absent, there is little left to justify their behavior except in God's name. And whatever the burning issue of the moment, they seldom want to talk about it---in fact they feel there is nothing to talk about. God has spoken and the matter is closed. If they ever accept change it takes decades or centuries, and other segments of society will have to bring the change about---they, at best, just ever so slowly sort of live with the change. Any acceptance of the change mostly comes from their offspring who are born into the changed environment. This is true whether it be slavery, women's rights, segregation, sexual freedoms, reproductive rights, living wages, gay rights, and dissension or diversity in general.
My favorite ethics philosopher is PETER SINGER. His conclusions are arrived at logically and rather clearly. He makes one think, and the thinking is unsettling. Ethics is not an all or none sort of thing. Singer has nudged me closer to an ethical mindset, but like most others, I operate ethically only to the point of my own comfort level. I think it is impossible to be very ethical in your life if short term goals are the focus. I think it is impossible to be considerably ethical if just your own life span is the focus. In fact I think truly ethical behavior is risky and in terms of material things, you could lose most everything you worked hard to gain. Ethics is not only wrapped up with logic and reason but the whole of God's evolutionary process. So many people talk about getting in tune with their inner self. I think the real challenge is to get in tune with the evolutionary process itself. The answer, my friend, is in Mother Nature. That, to me, is where you find yourself a part, however miniscule, of God's created evolutionary process. . At any rate below are some of Singer's quoted discourses on ethics.
Peter Singer:
One cannot, for instance, forget the difference between right and wrong. One can only cease to care about it.
Ethics is not something intelligible only in the context of religion. I treat ethics as entirely independent of religion.
If I am to defend my conduct on ethical grounds, I cannot point only to the benefits it brings me, I must address myself to a larger audience.
In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else.
The claim to equality does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact. There is no logically compelling reason for assuming that a factual difference in ability between two people justifies any difference in the amount of consideration we give to their needs and interests. The principle of equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.
Our concern for others and our readiness to consider their interest ought not to depend on what they are like or on what abilities they may possess. Concern for the well-being of children growing up in America would require that we teach them to read; concern for the well-being of pigs may require no more than that we leave them with other pigs in a place where there is adequate food and room to run freely. But the basic element---the taking into account of the interests of the being, whatever those interests may be---must, according to the principle of equality, be extended to all beings, black or white, masculine or feminine, human or nonhuman.
If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.
It is not necessary to insist that all animal experiments stop immediately. All we need say is that experiments serving no direct purpose should stop immediately, and in the remaining fields of research, we should, wherever possible, seek to replace experiments that involve animals with alternative methods that do not.
It is important to realize that the major health problems of the world largely continue to exist, not because we do not know how to prevent disease and keep people healthy, but because no one is putting enough effort and money into doing what we already know how to do. The diseases that ravage Asia, Africa, Latin America, and pockets of poverty in the industrialized West are diseases that, by and large, we know how to cure. They have been eliminated in communities that have adequate nutrition sanitation, and health care. It has been estimated that 250,000 children die each week around the world, and that one quarter of these deaths are by dehydration caused by diarrhea. A simple treatment, already known, and needing no animal experimentation, could prevent the deaths of these children.
Singer on human creation: "Many writers have described in detail how the Western tradition has put human beings on a pinnacle and separated them from the nonhuman animals. It was to humans that God gave dominion over the other animals; it was humans who were made in the image of God; and it was humans, and only humans, who had an immortal soul. Then, in 1838, a young scientist wrote in his notebook: 'Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and, I believe, true to consider him descendent from animals'." (Charles Darwin)
Singer on the environment: "According to Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings. God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God does not care how we treat it. Human beings are the only morally important members of this world. Nature itself is of no intrinsic value, and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful, unless by this destruction we harm human beings.
I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts, yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that I experience when I walk in a a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking forested valley, or sit by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set among tall green tree-ferns. For many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation; even nonreligious people tend to describe it in terms of spiritual experience. If we feel that a walk in the forest, with senses attuned to the appreciation of such an experience, is a more deeply rewarding way to spend a day than playing computer games, or if we feel that to carry one's food and shelter in a backpack for a week while hiking through an unspoiled natural environment will do more to develop character than watching television for an equivalent period, then we ought to encourage future generations to have feeling for nature; if they end up preferring computer games, we shall have failed.
Our own happiness, for example, is of intrinsic value, at least to most of us, in that we desire it for its own sake. Money, on the other hand, is only of instrumental value to us. We want it because of the things we can by with it, but if we were marooned on a desert island, we would not want it (whereas happiness would be just as important to us on a desert island as anywhere else).
Every living thing is pursuing its own good in its own unique way. Once we see this, we can see all living things 'as we see ourselves' and therefore 'we are ready to place the same value on their existence as we do our own.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant significant, we ought, morally, to do it. The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the principle takes, first, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Second, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position. I admit one feels less guilty about doing nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed, who have also done nothing. Yet this can make no real difference to our moral obligations.
I like Singer because he maximizes the use of logic to form moral principles. Here is an example:
Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In additon to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. On a day when Bob is out for a drive he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train with no one aboard , is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugattti is parked. Then nobody will be killed---but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it respresents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and financial security it represents. Bob's conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was gravely wrong. But then it reminds us that we, too, have opportunities to save the lives of children. We can give to organizations like Unicef or Oxgfan America. $200 in donations would help transform a sickly 2 year old into a healthy 6 year old---offering safe passage through childhood's most dangerous years. How should you judge yourself if you don't do it? If you still think it is wrong of Bob not to throw the switch that would have diverted the train and saved the child's life, then it is hard to see how you could deny that it is also very wrong not to send money to an organization that saves the lives of children. Unless, that is, there is some morally important difference between the two situations that I have overlooked. And what is one month's dining out, compared with a child's life? are you therefore obliged to keep giving until you have nothing left? At what point can you stop? Consider for yourself the level of sacrifice that you would demand of Bob, and then think about how much money you would have to give away in order to make a sacrifice that is roughly equal to that. It's almost certainly much, much more than $200. For most middle class Americans, it could easily be more like $200,000. When it comes to praising or blaming people for what they do, we tend to use a standard that is relative to some conception of normal behavior. Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens that I wouldn't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless, they should be doing much more, and they are in not position to criticize Bob for failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.
The United States government never meets even the modest target, recommended by the United Nations, of a .7 percent of gross national product; at the moment it lags far below that, at 0.09 percent, not even half of Japan's 0.22 percent or a tenth of Denmark's 0.97 percent.
The formula is simple: whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away. When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.
People often say that life is sacred. They almost never mean what they say. They do not mean, as their words imply, that life itself is sacred. If they did, killing a pig or pulling up a cabbage would be as abhorrent to them as the murder of a human being. We may take the doctrine of the sanctity of human life to be no more than a way of saying that human life has some special value, a value quite distinct from the value of the lives of other living things.
It is possible to give 'human being' a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to 'a member of the species homo sapiens. This can easily be determined by genetic make-up. Thus, defined in this way there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being. Another way to define 'human being' is arrived at by compiling the 'indicators of humanhood' that include self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, and curiosity. This is the sense of the term that we have in mind when we praise someone by saying that he/she is a real human being. (Person is not the same as human being. No one confuses a comatose genetic human being with the person they love or know).
To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race. (Morality cannot be built on genetic blueprints). I have argued that the life of a fetus or embryo is of no greater value than the life of a non human animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person.
Some of the conclusions I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views has been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands. The views I put forward should be judged, not by the extent to which they clash with accepted moral views but on the basis of the arguments by which they are defended.
What we really care about---and ought to care about----is the person rather than the body.
It is an essential feature of a right that one can waive one's right if one so chooses. I may have a right to privacy; but I can, if I wish, film every detail of my daily life and invite the neighbors to my home movies. Similarly, to say that I have a right to life is not to say that it would be wrong for my doctor to end my life, if the doctor does so at my request. In making this request I waive my right to life. Last, the principle of respect for autonomy tells us to allow rational agents to live their own lives according to their own autonomous decisions, free from coercion or interference; but if rational agents should autonomously choose to die, then respect for autonomy will lead us to assist them to do as they choose. The case for voluntary euthanasia is stronger than the case for non voluntary euthanasia.
Against a very small number of unnecessary deaths that might occur if euthanasia is legalized, we must place the very large amount of pain and distress that will be suffered if euthanasia is not legalized, by patients who really are terminally ill. Longer life is not such a supreme good that it outweighs all other considerations. (If it were, there would be many more effective ways of saving life---such as a ban on smoking, or a reduction of speed limits to 25 mph---than prohibiting voluntary euthanasia.) One morning Betty Rolling described what her mother, dying from cancer said to her: 'I've had a wonderful life, but now it's over, or it should be. I'm not afraid to die, but I am afraid of this illness, what it's doing to me.....There's never any relief from it now. Nothing but nausea and this pain.....There won't be any more chemotherapy. There's no treatment anymore. So what happens to me now? I now what happens. I'll die slowly...I don't want that....Who does it benefit if I die slowly? If it benefits my children I'd be willing. But it's not going to do you any good....There's no point in a slow death, none. I've never liked doing things with no point. I've got to end this.' The strength of the case for voluntary euthanasia lies in this combination of respect for the preferences, or autonomy, of those who decide for euthanasia, and in the clear rational basis of the decision itself.
We usually value life because it is the basis for everything else that we value, whether it be happiness, appreciation of beauty, creativity, love, or the exercise of our rational faculties. But there comes a time in the lives of many people when life can no longer support these things we value, or else is so racked by pain, discomfort, nausea, or other forms of suffering that it has more negative value than positive value. An individual who is adult and of sound mind is the best judge of when his or her life has lost what is positive about it.
Like cosmology before Copernicus, the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of human life is today in deep trouble. Its defenders have responded, naturally enough, by trying to patch up the holes that keep appearing in it. They have redefined death so that they can remove beating hearts from warm, breathing bodies, and give them to others with better prospects, while telling themselves that they are only taking organs from a corpse. They have drawn a distinction between 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' means of treatment, which allows them to persuade themselves that their decision to withdraw a respirator from a person in an irreversible coma has nothing to do with the patient's poor quality of life. They give terminally ill patients huge doses of morphine that they know will shorten their lives, but say that this is not euthanasia, because their declared intention is to relive pain. They select severely disable infants for 'nontreatment' and make sure that they die, without thinking of themselves as killing them....This patching could go on, but it is hard to see a long and beneficial future for an ethic as paradoxical, incoherent, and dependent on pretense as our conventional ethic of life and death has become.
Singer on killing 'persons': "If we are responsible for what we fail to do as we are for what we do, is it wrong to buy fashionable clothes, or to dine at expensive restaurants, when the money could have saved the life of a stranger dying for want of enough to eat? Is failing to give to aid organizations really a form of killing, or as bad as killing? In every day there are good grounds for having stricter prohibition on killing than on allowing to die. Killing a 'person' against her or his will is a much more serious wrong than killing a being that is not a 'person'. If we want to put this in the language of rights, then it is reasonable to say that only a 'person' has a right to life.
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant. We like to think of ourselves as the darlings of the universe. We do not like to think of ourselves as a species of animal. But the truth is that there is no unbridgeable gulf between us and other animals. Instead there is an overlap. The more intellectually sophisticated non human animals have a mental and emotional life that in every significant respect equals or surpasses that of some of the most profoundly intellectually disabled human beings. This is a statement of fact that can be tested and verified over and over again.
People approaching the end of their lives fear suffering more than death.
There is some common view that reason and argument play no role in our ethics, and therefore we have no need to defend our ethical views when they are challenged. Some people are more ready to reason about the merits of football players or chocolate cake recipes than they are about their belief in the sanctity of human life. It allows people to listen to a criticism of their own views and then say, 'Oh, yes, well that is your opinion, but I think differently'---as if that is the end of the discussion.
We have to choose between different possible ways of living: the way of living in which self-interest is paramount, or that in which ethics is paramount, or some trade--of between the two.
Whatever profit injustice may seem to bring, only those who act rightly are really happy.
We live in an age which conveys the idea that human aspirations for liberty, pleasure, accomplishment, and status can be fulfilled in the realm of consumption.
The ancients knew of the 'paradox of hedonism' according to which the more explicitly we pursue our desire for pleasure, the more elusive we will find its satisfaction. There is no reason to believe that human nature has changed so dramatically as to render this ancient wisdom inapplicable.
When we are in long standing relationships with people, it is less easy to see clearly whether we do what we do because it is right, or because we want, for all sorts of reasons, to preserve the relationship. We may also know that the other person will have opportunities to pay us back---to assist us, or to make life difficult for us--according to how we behave toward him or her. IN such relationships, ethics and self-interest are inextricably mingled, along with love, affection, gratitude, and many other central human feelings.
The possibility of taking the point of view of the universe overcomes the problem of finding meaning in our lives, despite the ephemeral nature of human existence when measured against all the eons of eternity. The ethical efforts and changes we make today could snowball and, over a long period of time, lead to much more far-reaching changes (this is called history). Or they could come to nothing. We simply cannot tell. We can make this four dimensional world a better place by causing there to be less pointless suffering in one particular place, at one particular time, than there would otherwise have been. As long as we do not thereby increase suffering at some other place or time, or cause any other comparable loss of value, we will have had a positive effect on the universe.
In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. The preservation of old growth forests should override our desire to use disposable paper towels. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities.
We cannot wait for government to bring about the change that is needed. It is not in the interests of politicians to challenge the fundamental assumptions of the society they have been elected to lead. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government. We have to take a first step. We must reinstate the idea of living an ethical life as a realistic and viable alternative to the present dominance of materialist self-interest.
To be ethical you are on the side of the weak, not the powerful, of the oppressed, not the oppressor, of the ridden, not the rider.
It is often said that money cannot buy happiness. This may be trite, but it implies that it is more in our interests to be happy than to be rich.
The evolutionary process embraces both competition and cooperation. The far political and religious right understand competition, but seldom cooperation.
If you leave a group of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they have nothing to contribute to it, you alienate them from the social practices and institutions of which they are a part; and they will almost certainly become adversaries who pose a threat to those institutions.
Singer on what distinguishes his ethical philosophy: "First it would not deny the existence of human nature or insist that human nature is inherently good or infinitely malleable. Second, it would not expect to end all conflict and strife between human beings. Third, it would not assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression, or social conditioning. Some will be, but not all".
Singer on what his ethical philosophy supports: "First, it would recognize that there is such a thing as human nature. It would seek to find out more about it so that it can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human beings are. Second, it would expect that, under many different social and economic systems, many people will act competitively in order to enhance their own status, gain power, and advance their interests and those of their kin. Third, it would expect that irrespective of the social and economic system in which they live, most people will respond positively to invitations to enter into mutually beneficial forms of cooperation, as long as the invitations are genuine. Fourth, it would promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition, and it would attempt to channel competition into socially desirable ends. Fifth, it would recognize that the way in which we exploit nonhuman animals is a legacy of a pre-Darwinian past which exaggerated the gulf between humans and other animals, and therefore work toward a higher moral status for nonhuman animals. Sixth, it would stand by the traditional values of the left by being on the side of the weak, poor, and oppressed, but think it very carefully about what will really work to benefit them.
One mark of living well is to live so that you can accept death and feel satisfied with what you have done with your life.
For some time now I have believed that the basic understanding of right and wrong is, at this point in evolutionary time, an innate part of human nature. Practically everyone knows right from wrong anywhere on the globe. The problem is being willing to do right rather than wrong. It is the same conflict throughout human history: self-interest vs ethics.
I also have come to believe that all ethical decisions should be based on reason and logic and consequences. I have lost a lot of interest in ancient dogmas, written by humans, as being some sort of official Word from God. This does not detract at all from any of the wisdom found in the various scriptures.
It does seem, without any careful analysis on my part, that the most contented people seem to be the most ethical. And the most ethical are certainly not the religious right in any religion. Their notions are rarely generated from logic and reason, but from highly selective faith based religious dogma. And I have yet to see any groups of the religious right in any religion who come across as happy contented campers. Whatever it is their faith generates, it is not tolerance or understanding or cooperation, or any form of live and let live. They seem to always be angry and forever on some sort of crusade, always of course in God's name. I tend to see the religious right ranting against others of different hues with a Bible of some sort in one hand and some sort of patriotic flag in the other. It is almost like in the name of God they are free to make the lives of so many others difficult and miserable. And their faith based notions, in their own mind, are always right. I guess when logic and reason are absent, there is little left to justify their behavior except in God's name. And whatever the burning issue of the moment, they seldom want to talk about it---in fact they feel there is nothing to talk about. God has spoken and the matter is closed. If they ever accept change it takes decades or centuries, and other segments of society will have to bring the change about---they, at best, just ever so slowly sort of live with the change. Any acceptance of the change mostly comes from their offspring who are born into the changed environment. This is true whether it be slavery, women's rights, segregation, sexual freedoms, reproductive rights, living wages, gay rights, and dissension or diversity in general.
My favorite ethics philosopher is PETER SINGER. His conclusions are arrived at logically and rather clearly. He makes one think, and the thinking is unsettling. Ethics is not an all or none sort of thing. Singer has nudged me closer to an ethical mindset, but like most others, I operate ethically only to the point of my own comfort level. I think it is impossible to be very ethical in your life if short term goals are the focus. I think it is impossible to be considerably ethical if just your own life span is the focus. In fact I think truly ethical behavior is risky and in terms of material things, you could lose most everything you worked hard to gain. Ethics is not only wrapped up with logic and reason but the whole of God's evolutionary process. So many people talk about getting in tune with their inner self. I think the real challenge is to get in tune with the evolutionary process itself. The answer, my friend, is in Mother Nature. That, to me, is where you find yourself a part, however miniscule, of God's created evolutionary process. . At any rate below are some of Singer's quoted discourses on ethics.
Peter Singer:
One cannot, for instance, forget the difference between right and wrong. One can only cease to care about it.
Ethics is not something intelligible only in the context of religion. I treat ethics as entirely independent of religion.
If I am to defend my conduct on ethical grounds, I cannot point only to the benefits it brings me, I must address myself to a larger audience.
In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else.
The claim to equality does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact. There is no logically compelling reason for assuming that a factual difference in ability between two people justifies any difference in the amount of consideration we give to their needs and interests. The principle of equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.
Our concern for others and our readiness to consider their interest ought not to depend on what they are like or on what abilities they may possess. Concern for the well-being of children growing up in America would require that we teach them to read; concern for the well-being of pigs may require no more than that we leave them with other pigs in a place where there is adequate food and room to run freely. But the basic element---the taking into account of the interests of the being, whatever those interests may be---must, according to the principle of equality, be extended to all beings, black or white, masculine or feminine, human or nonhuman.
If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.
It is not necessary to insist that all animal experiments stop immediately. All we need say is that experiments serving no direct purpose should stop immediately, and in the remaining fields of research, we should, wherever possible, seek to replace experiments that involve animals with alternative methods that do not.
It is important to realize that the major health problems of the world largely continue to exist, not because we do not know how to prevent disease and keep people healthy, but because no one is putting enough effort and money into doing what we already know how to do. The diseases that ravage Asia, Africa, Latin America, and pockets of poverty in the industrialized West are diseases that, by and large, we know how to cure. They have been eliminated in communities that have adequate nutrition sanitation, and health care. It has been estimated that 250,000 children die each week around the world, and that one quarter of these deaths are by dehydration caused by diarrhea. A simple treatment, already known, and needing no animal experimentation, could prevent the deaths of these children.
Singer on human creation: "Many writers have described in detail how the Western tradition has put human beings on a pinnacle and separated them from the nonhuman animals. It was to humans that God gave dominion over the other animals; it was humans who were made in the image of God; and it was humans, and only humans, who had an immortal soul. Then, in 1838, a young scientist wrote in his notebook: 'Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and, I believe, true to consider him descendent from animals'." (Charles Darwin)
Singer on the environment: "According to Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings. God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God does not care how we treat it. Human beings are the only morally important members of this world. Nature itself is of no intrinsic value, and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful, unless by this destruction we harm human beings.
I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts, yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that I experience when I walk in a a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking forested valley, or sit by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set among tall green tree-ferns. For many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation; even nonreligious people tend to describe it in terms of spiritual experience. If we feel that a walk in the forest, with senses attuned to the appreciation of such an experience, is a more deeply rewarding way to spend a day than playing computer games, or if we feel that to carry one's food and shelter in a backpack for a week while hiking through an unspoiled natural environment will do more to develop character than watching television for an equivalent period, then we ought to encourage future generations to have feeling for nature; if they end up preferring computer games, we shall have failed.
Our own happiness, for example, is of intrinsic value, at least to most of us, in that we desire it for its own sake. Money, on the other hand, is only of instrumental value to us. We want it because of the things we can by with it, but if we were marooned on a desert island, we would not want it (whereas happiness would be just as important to us on a desert island as anywhere else).
Every living thing is pursuing its own good in its own unique way. Once we see this, we can see all living things 'as we see ourselves' and therefore 'we are ready to place the same value on their existence as we do our own.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant significant, we ought, morally, to do it. The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the principle takes, first, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Second, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position. I admit one feels less guilty about doing nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed, who have also done nothing. Yet this can make no real difference to our moral obligations.
I like Singer because he maximizes the use of logic to form moral principles. Here is an example:
Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In additon to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. On a day when Bob is out for a drive he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train with no one aboard , is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugattti is parked. Then nobody will be killed---but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it respresents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and financial security it represents. Bob's conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was gravely wrong. But then it reminds us that we, too, have opportunities to save the lives of children. We can give to organizations like Unicef or Oxgfan America. $200 in donations would help transform a sickly 2 year old into a healthy 6 year old---offering safe passage through childhood's most dangerous years. How should you judge yourself if you don't do it? If you still think it is wrong of Bob not to throw the switch that would have diverted the train and saved the child's life, then it is hard to see how you could deny that it is also very wrong not to send money to an organization that saves the lives of children. Unless, that is, there is some morally important difference between the two situations that I have overlooked. And what is one month's dining out, compared with a child's life? are you therefore obliged to keep giving until you have nothing left? At what point can you stop? Consider for yourself the level of sacrifice that you would demand of Bob, and then think about how much money you would have to give away in order to make a sacrifice that is roughly equal to that. It's almost certainly much, much more than $200. For most middle class Americans, it could easily be more like $200,000. When it comes to praising or blaming people for what they do, we tend to use a standard that is relative to some conception of normal behavior. Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens that I wouldn't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless, they should be doing much more, and they are in not position to criticize Bob for failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.
The United States government never meets even the modest target, recommended by the United Nations, of a .7 percent of gross national product; at the moment it lags far below that, at 0.09 percent, not even half of Japan's 0.22 percent or a tenth of Denmark's 0.97 percent.
The formula is simple: whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away. When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.
People often say that life is sacred. They almost never mean what they say. They do not mean, as their words imply, that life itself is sacred. If they did, killing a pig or pulling up a cabbage would be as abhorrent to them as the murder of a human being. We may take the doctrine of the sanctity of human life to be no more than a way of saying that human life has some special value, a value quite distinct from the value of the lives of other living things.
It is possible to give 'human being' a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to 'a member of the species homo sapiens. This can easily be determined by genetic make-up. Thus, defined in this way there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being. Another way to define 'human being' is arrived at by compiling the 'indicators of humanhood' that include self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, and curiosity. This is the sense of the term that we have in mind when we praise someone by saying that he/she is a real human being. (Person is not the same as human being. No one confuses a comatose genetic human being with the person they love or know).
To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race. (Morality cannot be built on genetic blueprints). I have argued that the life of a fetus or embryo is of no greater value than the life of a non human animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person.
Some of the conclusions I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views has been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands. The views I put forward should be judged, not by the extent to which they clash with accepted moral views but on the basis of the arguments by which they are defended.
What we really care about---and ought to care about----is the person rather than the body.
It is an essential feature of a right that one can waive one's right if one so chooses. I may have a right to privacy; but I can, if I wish, film every detail of my daily life and invite the neighbors to my home movies. Similarly, to say that I have a right to life is not to say that it would be wrong for my doctor to end my life, if the doctor does so at my request. In making this request I waive my right to life. Last, the principle of respect for autonomy tells us to allow rational agents to live their own lives according to their own autonomous decisions, free from coercion or interference; but if rational agents should autonomously choose to die, then respect for autonomy will lead us to assist them to do as they choose. The case for voluntary euthanasia is stronger than the case for non voluntary euthanasia.
Against a very small number of unnecessary deaths that might occur if euthanasia is legalized, we must place the very large amount of pain and distress that will be suffered if euthanasia is not legalized, by patients who really are terminally ill. Longer life is not such a supreme good that it outweighs all other considerations. (If it were, there would be many more effective ways of saving life---such as a ban on smoking, or a reduction of speed limits to 25 mph---than prohibiting voluntary euthanasia.) One morning Betty Rolling described what her mother, dying from cancer said to her: 'I've had a wonderful life, but now it's over, or it should be. I'm not afraid to die, but I am afraid of this illness, what it's doing to me.....There's never any relief from it now. Nothing but nausea and this pain.....There won't be any more chemotherapy. There's no treatment anymore. So what happens to me now? I now what happens. I'll die slowly...I don't want that....Who does it benefit if I die slowly? If it benefits my children I'd be willing. But it's not going to do you any good....There's no point in a slow death, none. I've never liked doing things with no point. I've got to end this.' The strength of the case for voluntary euthanasia lies in this combination of respect for the preferences, or autonomy, of those who decide for euthanasia, and in the clear rational basis of the decision itself.
We usually value life because it is the basis for everything else that we value, whether it be happiness, appreciation of beauty, creativity, love, or the exercise of our rational faculties. But there comes a time in the lives of many people when life can no longer support these things we value, or else is so racked by pain, discomfort, nausea, or other forms of suffering that it has more negative value than positive value. An individual who is adult and of sound mind is the best judge of when his or her life has lost what is positive about it.
Like cosmology before Copernicus, the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of human life is today in deep trouble. Its defenders have responded, naturally enough, by trying to patch up the holes that keep appearing in it. They have redefined death so that they can remove beating hearts from warm, breathing bodies, and give them to others with better prospects, while telling themselves that they are only taking organs from a corpse. They have drawn a distinction between 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' means of treatment, which allows them to persuade themselves that their decision to withdraw a respirator from a person in an irreversible coma has nothing to do with the patient's poor quality of life. They give terminally ill patients huge doses of morphine that they know will shorten their lives, but say that this is not euthanasia, because their declared intention is to relive pain. They select severely disable infants for 'nontreatment' and make sure that they die, without thinking of themselves as killing them....This patching could go on, but it is hard to see a long and beneficial future for an ethic as paradoxical, incoherent, and dependent on pretense as our conventional ethic of life and death has become.
Singer on killing 'persons': "If we are responsible for what we fail to do as we are for what we do, is it wrong to buy fashionable clothes, or to dine at expensive restaurants, when the money could have saved the life of a stranger dying for want of enough to eat? Is failing to give to aid organizations really a form of killing, or as bad as killing? In every day there are good grounds for having stricter prohibition on killing than on allowing to die. Killing a 'person' against her or his will is a much more serious wrong than killing a being that is not a 'person'. If we want to put this in the language of rights, then it is reasonable to say that only a 'person' has a right to life.
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant. We like to think of ourselves as the darlings of the universe. We do not like to think of ourselves as a species of animal. But the truth is that there is no unbridgeable gulf between us and other animals. Instead there is an overlap. The more intellectually sophisticated non human animals have a mental and emotional life that in every significant respect equals or surpasses that of some of the most profoundly intellectually disabled human beings. This is a statement of fact that can be tested and verified over and over again.
People approaching the end of their lives fear suffering more than death.
There is some common view that reason and argument play no role in our ethics, and therefore we have no need to defend our ethical views when they are challenged. Some people are more ready to reason about the merits of football players or chocolate cake recipes than they are about their belief in the sanctity of human life. It allows people to listen to a criticism of their own views and then say, 'Oh, yes, well that is your opinion, but I think differently'---as if that is the end of the discussion.
We have to choose between different possible ways of living: the way of living in which self-interest is paramount, or that in which ethics is paramount, or some trade--of between the two.
Whatever profit injustice may seem to bring, only those who act rightly are really happy.
We live in an age which conveys the idea that human aspirations for liberty, pleasure, accomplishment, and status can be fulfilled in the realm of consumption.
The ancients knew of the 'paradox of hedonism' according to which the more explicitly we pursue our desire for pleasure, the more elusive we will find its satisfaction. There is no reason to believe that human nature has changed so dramatically as to render this ancient wisdom inapplicable.
When we are in long standing relationships with people, it is less easy to see clearly whether we do what we do because it is right, or because we want, for all sorts of reasons, to preserve the relationship. We may also know that the other person will have opportunities to pay us back---to assist us, or to make life difficult for us--according to how we behave toward him or her. IN such relationships, ethics and self-interest are inextricably mingled, along with love, affection, gratitude, and many other central human feelings.
The possibility of taking the point of view of the universe overcomes the problem of finding meaning in our lives, despite the ephemeral nature of human existence when measured against all the eons of eternity. The ethical efforts and changes we make today could snowball and, over a long period of time, lead to much more far-reaching changes (this is called history). Or they could come to nothing. We simply cannot tell. We can make this four dimensional world a better place by causing there to be less pointless suffering in one particular place, at one particular time, than there would otherwise have been. As long as we do not thereby increase suffering at some other place or time, or cause any other comparable loss of value, we will have had a positive effect on the universe.
In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. The preservation of old growth forests should override our desire to use disposable paper towels. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities.
We cannot wait for government to bring about the change that is needed. It is not in the interests of politicians to challenge the fundamental assumptions of the society they have been elected to lead. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government. We have to take a first step. We must reinstate the idea of living an ethical life as a realistic and viable alternative to the present dominance of materialist self-interest.
To be ethical you are on the side of the weak, not the powerful, of the oppressed, not the oppressor, of the ridden, not the rider.
It is often said that money cannot buy happiness. This may be trite, but it implies that it is more in our interests to be happy than to be rich.
The evolutionary process embraces both competition and cooperation. The far political and religious right understand competition, but seldom cooperation.
If you leave a group of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they have nothing to contribute to it, you alienate them from the social practices and institutions of which they are a part; and they will almost certainly become adversaries who pose a threat to those institutions.
Singer on what distinguishes his ethical philosophy: "First it would not deny the existence of human nature or insist that human nature is inherently good or infinitely malleable. Second, it would not expect to end all conflict and strife between human beings. Third, it would not assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression, or social conditioning. Some will be, but not all".
Singer on what his ethical philosophy supports: "First, it would recognize that there is such a thing as human nature. It would seek to find out more about it so that it can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human beings are. Second, it would expect that, under many different social and economic systems, many people will act competitively in order to enhance their own status, gain power, and advance their interests and those of their kin. Third, it would expect that irrespective of the social and economic system in which they live, most people will respond positively to invitations to enter into mutually beneficial forms of cooperation, as long as the invitations are genuine. Fourth, it would promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition, and it would attempt to channel competition into socially desirable ends. Fifth, it would recognize that the way in which we exploit nonhuman animals is a legacy of a pre-Darwinian past which exaggerated the gulf between humans and other animals, and therefore work toward a higher moral status for nonhuman animals. Sixth, it would stand by the traditional values of the left by being on the side of the weak, poor, and oppressed, but think it very carefully about what will really work to benefit them.
One mark of living well is to live so that you can accept death and feel satisfied with what you have done with your life.
Monday, November 17, 2008
The 'Terrell Owens of Politics'
Victoria Woodhull was born in 1838 and was no minor figure during her lifetime. She was the 'Terrell Owens' of politics during her time. I find two things truly amazing about Victoria Woodhull. One, she surely must have been the first true 'hippie'. Everything about her fits the 1960's which came 100 years after her first run for President. She ran on a platform that called for a graduated direct taxation, the regulation of monopolies, laws to protect laborers, a civil service based on merit, equal rights for women including the right to vote, giving ownership of land mineral and water resources to the people, guaranteed employment to all, and the establishment of a universal government with international arbitration for wars. The second amazing thing about Victoria Woodhull is that the history books ignore her almost completely. Most Americans are not even aware she ran for President even though in her time she was one of the most well known figures in the country. President Grant once told her in his White House Office that "Some day you will be sitting in this Office".
Her resume is impressive. She dominated four major suffrage conventions, she ran for President twice (women couldn't vote back then but they could run for President), she was the first major female player on Wall Street (where she made a fortune), the first woman to be granted high level appearances before Congress, she became a major focal point in the national debate over pornography (jailed several times but each time a jury found her not guilty), the major public figure to confront the double standard for women in business and sex, and was the major publisher of a popular weekly newspaper.
She was raised in an age when spiritualism was rampant. Born in the poorest of families she was married at age 15 to an older medical doctor with whom she had two children. She then divorced him and married a Civil War veteran forming a family unit that consisted of herself, her former husband, her sister, her mother and father, her current husband, and her children. Her home was a virtual and perpetual open house. It was the place to go for stimulating discussions and to meet important people.
She was extremely attractive, very smart, and understood how the male world worked back then, and had the intelligence and beauty to manipulate men as they manipulated women. Her first area of attention was suffrage but she was nothing like like any of the other female suffrage leaders. They were prim and proper, laid back, and anything but sexy. Victoria took these conventions by storm. The leaders needed her money and she was generous with it. The suffrage leaders resented her deeply but they were trapped---Victoria had the money and a huge following. At first the male leaders in the country found her delightful, entertaining, and fun to be around. Then she announced she was running for President and challenged the status quo with a vengeance. It wasn't long before she was called Public Enemy #1. As the ensuing quotations show, she hit the status quo on all sides. She, in her outspoken but colorful way of speaking, said: "I believe it is my duty and mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system. It need be pointed out that women back then had few social or legal rights. In the 1870's, for example, 80 percent of men seeking a divorce stated as their reason the "failure of their wife to be submissive helpmates". The quotations below on sex need be viewed in the context of this background. In the end she was hounded so much by political and some religious leaders to the point she moved to England and spent the rest of her life there. Her husband perhaps summed her up best: "She was more alive than anyone I have ever met. Ordinary words don't describe her. When you were with her everything became so thrilling, so worthwhile. You looked at the world through her eyes and you saw miracles all around you. The commonplace, the dull, the everyday disappeared. She wanted people to be happy and she made them happy." Of course, since women couldn't vote, she never got elected President but said later, "I hardly expected to be elected. The truth is I am too many years ahead of this age, and the exalted views and objects of humanitarianism can scarcely be grasped as yet by the unenlightened mind of the average man." And of course, in hindsight she was right. Most of her political platform eventually came to be, and maybe the rest will some day too. For all the free love talk, which I think to most means something different than what she meant----for all that talk her own family consisted of a large extended family which stayed with her their entire life. No one ever fell by the wayside. To my knowledge, no friend, of her many friends, ever turned against her. I think that says a lot about Victoria Woodhull. One wonders, can those who labeled her a moral depravate be right if all her army of friends could never find anything morally depraved about her? What is truth? Victoria Woodhull made everyone think about truth. Below are some quotations from her:
"While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of women with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should be treated, socially and politically as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the disenfranchised women of the country, and believing as I do that I happen to be the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic, I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable the comment this letter may evoke I trust that my sincerity will not be called in question."
"Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life."
"The American nation in its march onward and upward, cannot publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half of its citizens by narrow statutes. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained. As the world has advanced into civilization and culture; as mind has risen in its dominion over matter; as the principle of justice and moral right has gained sway....as the might of right has supplanted the right of might, so have the rights of women become more fully recognized."
It is the inversion (the topsi-ter-vi-ness) of our existing society that wealth, substance, mere material Bulk, is put above Thought, Science, Truth; that the buttocks of the community are upheaved, in an unseemly way, above its head. It is, then, part of my objective to reinvert the grand man; and set him on his feet, or to seat him on its legitimate posterior."
Is it right that the millions should toil all their lives long, scarcely having comfortable food and clothes, while the few manage to control all the benefits? People may pretend that is justice, and good Christians may excuse it upon that ground, but Christ would never have called it by that name. He would have given him that labored but an hour as much as he that labored all the day, but to him that labored not at all he would take away even that which he hath.... A system of society which permits such arbitrary distributions of wealth is a disgrace to Christian civilization....Christianity of today is a failure....the church has allied itself with money and power, when it should be speaking for the powerless....true religion will not shut itself up in any church away from humanity; it will not stand idly by and see the people suffer from any misery whatsoever...it is foolish for a Christian to say, 'I have nothing to do with politics'....It is the bounded duty of every Christian to support that political party which bases itself upon Human Rights, and if there is no such party existing, then to go about to construct one."
If Congress refuses to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women. Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?....We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed, but shall do so in reality."
"I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it. I have a consciousness within which is above all such petty malice, yet it grieves me that there should be anything to interfere with obtaining justice at the earliest possible moment. Some say they would rather never obtain it than that it should come from such a source as myself."
One of the charges against me is that I lived in the same house with my former husband, Dr. Woodhull, and my present husband, Col. Blood. The fact is a fact. Dr. Woodhull being sick, ailing and incapable of self-support, I felt it my duty to myself and to human nature that he should be cared for, although his incapacity was in no wise attributable to me. My present husband, Col Blood, not only approves of this charity, but co-operates in it. I esteem it one of the most virtuous acts of my life. But various editors have stigmatized me as a living example of immorality and unchastity....I was divorced from Dr. Woodhull for reasons which to me were sufficient, but I was never his enemy. He continued to need my friendship, and he has had it. My children continued to prize and to need his affection and presence, and they have had them."
"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I do not intend to be made the scape-goat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover over the foulness of their lives and the feculence of their thoughts with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and by diverting public attention from their own iniquity and pointing the finger at me."
"Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love everyday if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. I am fully persuaded that the very highest sexual unions are monogamic, and that these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting. Now if to this be added the fact that the highest gratification comes from rendering its object the greatest amount of happiness depend upon whatever it may, then you have my ideal of the highest order of love and the most perfect degree of order to which humanity can attain...Love is that which exists to do good, not merely to get good....Contemplate this, and then denounce me for advocating freedom if you can and I will bear your curse with a better resignation."
"Oh the stupid blindness of this people! Swindled every day before their very eyes, and yet they don't seem to know that there is anything wrong, simply because no law has been violated. As Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks, or make dividends by which, in a few years, he amasses fifty million dollars from the industries of the country, and he is one of the remarkable men of the age. But if a poor, half-starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard to prevent starvation, she would be sent first to the Tombs and thense to Blackwell's Island. An Astor may sit in his sumptuous apartments and watch the property bequeathed him by his father, rise in value from one to fifty millions, and everybody bows before his immense power, and worships his business capacity. But if a tenant of his, whose employer has discharged him because he did not vote the Republican ticket, and thereby fails to pay his monthly rent to Mr. Aster, the law sets him and his family into the street in midwinter, and, whether he dies of cold or starvation, neither Mr Astor or anybody else stops to ask, since that is nobody's business but the man's. But it is asked, how is this to be remedied? I answer, very easily! Since those who possess the accumulated wealth of the country have filched it by legal means form those to whom it justly belongs---the people--it must be returned to them, by legal means if possible, but it must be returned to them in any event. When a person worth millions dies, instead of leaving it to his children, who have no more title to it than anybody else's children have, it must revert to the people who really produced it. These privileged classes of the people have an enduring hatred for me, and I am glad they have. I am the friend not only of freedom in all things, and in every form, but also for equality and justice as well."
"Declaring that imprisonment would not stop her, Victoria declared, "The old, worn-out, rotten social system will be torn down, plank by plank, timber after timber, until place is given to a new, true and beautiful structure, based upon freedom, equality, and justice to all---to women as well as men; the results of which can be nothing else than physical health, intellectual honesty and moral purity."
"I charge upon this government that it is a failure because it has neither secured freedom (and by this I mean the personal rights of individuals), maintained equality, nor administered justice to its citizens. The bondholders, money-lenders and railroad kings say to the politicians: If you will legislate for our interests, we will retain you in power, and, together (you with the public offices and patronage and we with our immense dependencies and money), we can control the destinies of the country, and change the government to suit ourselves; and now finally, comes in the threatened church power, and it says: If you will make your government a Christian government, we will bring all the 'Faithful' to your support;---and thus united, let me warn you, they constitute the strongest power in the world. It is the government, all the wealth of the country, backed up by the church against the unorganized mass of reformers, every one of whom is pulling his or her little string in opposing directions."
Victoria's most controversial speech: "Of all the horrid brutalities of this age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and million---yes I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak----millions of poor, heart broken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust....The world has got to be startled from this pretense into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invest men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills, yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality! I say it boldly, that it is the best men of the country who support the houses of prostitution. It isn't your young men, but the husbands and fathers of the country, who occupy position of honor and trust. It is not the hardworking industrial masses at all, but those who have the money and the time to expend for such purposes who are really the old hoary-headed villains of the country. The young haven't money enough to support themselves. So when you condemn the poor women, whom you have helped to drive to such a life, remember to visit your wrath upon the best men of the country as well. I was married at fourteen, ignorant of everything that related to my maternal functions. For this ignorance, and because I knew no better than to surrender my maternal functions to a drunken man, I am cursed with this living death. So after all I am a very promiscuous free lover. I want the love of you all, promiscuously. I makes no differenced who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian. I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love. If you will not give it to me now, these young, for whom I plead, will in after years bless Victoria Woodhull for daring to speak for their salvation."
"A woman will lavish love and care and attention on a pet cat, or a prize poodle, and yet draw her skirts aside from the starving children in the gutter. The mew of the cat and the howl of the dog, to say nothing of the squeal of the 'tortured rabbit'---that figment of anti-vivisectionist imagination---are far more potent to loosen the purse strings of the sentimentalists than the wail of children."
Late in life she mused: "I feel a sad tired feeling---a lonesomeness. And a soul asking of what is life---wealth only shows you the falsity of life. They flock to me for material things---so different from those way back who came to me because they understood the truth and my mission. What does one gain if they get the world and lose soul power?
She died at the age of 88 and said she wanted to be remembered by a line from Kant: "You cannot understand a man's work by what he has accomplished, but by what he has overcome in accomplishing it." Victoria wrote shortly before her death: "I retain not one ill-will recollection. I gave America my youth. It was sweet and gallant and fruitful---its memories are buoyant....That excellencies pretended to misunderstand and undertook to impugn was their defect, not mine."
"By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?
For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.
I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice.
I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.
I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.
I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.
If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.
It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.
Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.
My judges preach against free love openly, practice it secretly.
Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.
Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped."
Her resume is impressive. She dominated four major suffrage conventions, she ran for President twice (women couldn't vote back then but they could run for President), she was the first major female player on Wall Street (where she made a fortune), the first woman to be granted high level appearances before Congress, she became a major focal point in the national debate over pornography (jailed several times but each time a jury found her not guilty), the major public figure to confront the double standard for women in business and sex, and was the major publisher of a popular weekly newspaper.
She was raised in an age when spiritualism was rampant. Born in the poorest of families she was married at age 15 to an older medical doctor with whom she had two children. She then divorced him and married a Civil War veteran forming a family unit that consisted of herself, her former husband, her sister, her mother and father, her current husband, and her children. Her home was a virtual and perpetual open house. It was the place to go for stimulating discussions and to meet important people.
She was extremely attractive, very smart, and understood how the male world worked back then, and had the intelligence and beauty to manipulate men as they manipulated women. Her first area of attention was suffrage but she was nothing like like any of the other female suffrage leaders. They were prim and proper, laid back, and anything but sexy. Victoria took these conventions by storm. The leaders needed her money and she was generous with it. The suffrage leaders resented her deeply but they were trapped---Victoria had the money and a huge following. At first the male leaders in the country found her delightful, entertaining, and fun to be around. Then she announced she was running for President and challenged the status quo with a vengeance. It wasn't long before she was called Public Enemy #1. As the ensuing quotations show, she hit the status quo on all sides. She, in her outspoken but colorful way of speaking, said: "I believe it is my duty and mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity, and social purity, now passes as the social system. It need be pointed out that women back then had few social or legal rights. In the 1870's, for example, 80 percent of men seeking a divorce stated as their reason the "failure of their wife to be submissive helpmates". The quotations below on sex need be viewed in the context of this background. In the end she was hounded so much by political and some religious leaders to the point she moved to England and spent the rest of her life there. Her husband perhaps summed her up best: "She was more alive than anyone I have ever met. Ordinary words don't describe her. When you were with her everything became so thrilling, so worthwhile. You looked at the world through her eyes and you saw miracles all around you. The commonplace, the dull, the everyday disappeared. She wanted people to be happy and she made them happy." Of course, since women couldn't vote, she never got elected President but said later, "I hardly expected to be elected. The truth is I am too many years ahead of this age, and the exalted views and objects of humanitarianism can scarcely be grasped as yet by the unenlightened mind of the average man." And of course, in hindsight she was right. Most of her political platform eventually came to be, and maybe the rest will some day too. For all the free love talk, which I think to most means something different than what she meant----for all that talk her own family consisted of a large extended family which stayed with her their entire life. No one ever fell by the wayside. To my knowledge, no friend, of her many friends, ever turned against her. I think that says a lot about Victoria Woodhull. One wonders, can those who labeled her a moral depravate be right if all her army of friends could never find anything morally depraved about her? What is truth? Victoria Woodhull made everyone think about truth. Below are some quotations from her:
"While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of women with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should be treated, socially and politically as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the disenfranchised women of the country, and believing as I do that I happen to be the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic, I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable the comment this letter may evoke I trust that my sincerity will not be called in question."
"Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life."
"The American nation in its march onward and upward, cannot publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half of its citizens by narrow statutes. The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression of that will by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained. As the world has advanced into civilization and culture; as mind has risen in its dominion over matter; as the principle of justice and moral right has gained sway....as the might of right has supplanted the right of might, so have the rights of women become more fully recognized."
It is the inversion (the topsi-ter-vi-ness) of our existing society that wealth, substance, mere material Bulk, is put above Thought, Science, Truth; that the buttocks of the community are upheaved, in an unseemly way, above its head. It is, then, part of my objective to reinvert the grand man; and set him on his feet, or to seat him on its legitimate posterior."
Is it right that the millions should toil all their lives long, scarcely having comfortable food and clothes, while the few manage to control all the benefits? People may pretend that is justice, and good Christians may excuse it upon that ground, but Christ would never have called it by that name. He would have given him that labored but an hour as much as he that labored all the day, but to him that labored not at all he would take away even that which he hath.... A system of society which permits such arbitrary distributions of wealth is a disgrace to Christian civilization....Christianity of today is a failure....the church has allied itself with money and power, when it should be speaking for the powerless....true religion will not shut itself up in any church away from humanity; it will not stand idly by and see the people suffer from any misery whatsoever...it is foolish for a Christian to say, 'I have nothing to do with politics'....It is the bounded duty of every Christian to support that political party which bases itself upon Human Rights, and if there is no such party existing, then to go about to construct one."
If Congress refuses to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women. Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?....We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed, but shall do so in reality."
"I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it. I have a consciousness within which is above all such petty malice, yet it grieves me that there should be anything to interfere with obtaining justice at the earliest possible moment. Some say they would rather never obtain it than that it should come from such a source as myself."
One of the charges against me is that I lived in the same house with my former husband, Dr. Woodhull, and my present husband, Col. Blood. The fact is a fact. Dr. Woodhull being sick, ailing and incapable of self-support, I felt it my duty to myself and to human nature that he should be cared for, although his incapacity was in no wise attributable to me. My present husband, Col Blood, not only approves of this charity, but co-operates in it. I esteem it one of the most virtuous acts of my life. But various editors have stigmatized me as a living example of immorality and unchastity....I was divorced from Dr. Woodhull for reasons which to me were sufficient, but I was never his enemy. He continued to need my friendship, and he has had it. My children continued to prize and to need his affection and presence, and they have had them."
"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I do not intend to be made the scape-goat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover over the foulness of their lives and the feculence of their thoughts with hypocritical mouthing of fair professions, and by diverting public attention from their own iniquity and pointing the finger at me."
"Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love everyday if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. I am fully persuaded that the very highest sexual unions are monogamic, and that these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting. Now if to this be added the fact that the highest gratification comes from rendering its object the greatest amount of happiness depend upon whatever it may, then you have my ideal of the highest order of love and the most perfect degree of order to which humanity can attain...Love is that which exists to do good, not merely to get good....Contemplate this, and then denounce me for advocating freedom if you can and I will bear your curse with a better resignation."
"Oh the stupid blindness of this people! Swindled every day before their very eyes, and yet they don't seem to know that there is anything wrong, simply because no law has been violated. As Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks, or make dividends by which, in a few years, he amasses fifty million dollars from the industries of the country, and he is one of the remarkable men of the age. But if a poor, half-starved child were to take a loaf of bread from his cupboard to prevent starvation, she would be sent first to the Tombs and thense to Blackwell's Island. An Astor may sit in his sumptuous apartments and watch the property bequeathed him by his father, rise in value from one to fifty millions, and everybody bows before his immense power, and worships his business capacity. But if a tenant of his, whose employer has discharged him because he did not vote the Republican ticket, and thereby fails to pay his monthly rent to Mr. Aster, the law sets him and his family into the street in midwinter, and, whether he dies of cold or starvation, neither Mr Astor or anybody else stops to ask, since that is nobody's business but the man's. But it is asked, how is this to be remedied? I answer, very easily! Since those who possess the accumulated wealth of the country have filched it by legal means form those to whom it justly belongs---the people--it must be returned to them, by legal means if possible, but it must be returned to them in any event. When a person worth millions dies, instead of leaving it to his children, who have no more title to it than anybody else's children have, it must revert to the people who really produced it. These privileged classes of the people have an enduring hatred for me, and I am glad they have. I am the friend not only of freedom in all things, and in every form, but also for equality and justice as well."
"Declaring that imprisonment would not stop her, Victoria declared, "The old, worn-out, rotten social system will be torn down, plank by plank, timber after timber, until place is given to a new, true and beautiful structure, based upon freedom, equality, and justice to all---to women as well as men; the results of which can be nothing else than physical health, intellectual honesty and moral purity."
"I charge upon this government that it is a failure because it has neither secured freedom (and by this I mean the personal rights of individuals), maintained equality, nor administered justice to its citizens. The bondholders, money-lenders and railroad kings say to the politicians: If you will legislate for our interests, we will retain you in power, and, together (you with the public offices and patronage and we with our immense dependencies and money), we can control the destinies of the country, and change the government to suit ourselves; and now finally, comes in the threatened church power, and it says: If you will make your government a Christian government, we will bring all the 'Faithful' to your support;---and thus united, let me warn you, they constitute the strongest power in the world. It is the government, all the wealth of the country, backed up by the church against the unorganized mass of reformers, every one of whom is pulling his or her little string in opposing directions."
Victoria's most controversial speech: "Of all the horrid brutalities of this age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and million---yes I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak----millions of poor, heart broken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust....The world has got to be startled from this pretense into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invest men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills, yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality! I say it boldly, that it is the best men of the country who support the houses of prostitution. It isn't your young men, but the husbands and fathers of the country, who occupy position of honor and trust. It is not the hardworking industrial masses at all, but those who have the money and the time to expend for such purposes who are really the old hoary-headed villains of the country. The young haven't money enough to support themselves. So when you condemn the poor women, whom you have helped to drive to such a life, remember to visit your wrath upon the best men of the country as well. I was married at fourteen, ignorant of everything that related to my maternal functions. For this ignorance, and because I knew no better than to surrender my maternal functions to a drunken man, I am cursed with this living death. So after all I am a very promiscuous free lover. I want the love of you all, promiscuously. I makes no differenced who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian. I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love. If you will not give it to me now, these young, for whom I plead, will in after years bless Victoria Woodhull for daring to speak for their salvation."
"A woman will lavish love and care and attention on a pet cat, or a prize poodle, and yet draw her skirts aside from the starving children in the gutter. The mew of the cat and the howl of the dog, to say nothing of the squeal of the 'tortured rabbit'---that figment of anti-vivisectionist imagination---are far more potent to loosen the purse strings of the sentimentalists than the wail of children."
Late in life she mused: "I feel a sad tired feeling---a lonesomeness. And a soul asking of what is life---wealth only shows you the falsity of life. They flock to me for material things---so different from those way back who came to me because they understood the truth and my mission. What does one gain if they get the world and lose soul power?
She died at the age of 88 and said she wanted to be remembered by a line from Kant: "You cannot understand a man's work by what he has accomplished, but by what he has overcome in accomplishing it." Victoria wrote shortly before her death: "I retain not one ill-will recollection. I gave America my youth. It was sweet and gallant and fruitful---its memories are buoyant....That excellencies pretended to misunderstand and undertook to impugn was their defect, not mine."
"By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?
For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.
I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice.
I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.
I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.
I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.
If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.
It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.
Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.
My judges preach against free love openly, practice it secretly.
Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.
Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped."
Saturday, November 15, 2008
A MOST DISASTROUS WAR
A Most Disastrous War
Periodically I feel the need to blast away at our now 40 years old War on Drugs. To deal adequately with this topic takes a whole book---a few responsible such books have been written but little read. To write a short musing on this topic requires the kind of condensation most difficult to achieve, especially for a wind bag like me. With many problems I like to start with Lincoln's wisdom on approaching a problem: "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it."
After 40 yrs of our expensive War on Drugs, just where are we? The U.S., of all the modern industrialized nations, has the greatest percentage of people in jail for drug use or trafficking, has created more urban and suburban ghettoes as a consequence of this War, and has a recreational drug abuse level as high or higher than these other industrialized countries. Why then do we continue a War which, after 40 years, has achieved little---if anything---and permanently destroys the life of so many young people most in need of help? When it comes to recreational drug abuse we live in the Dark Ages, a most unenlightened stubborn adherence to politically and religiously instilled fabricated notions.
We cannot responsibly confront recreational drug abuse until we understand what constitutes drug abuse and why people abuse recreational drugs. Everyone knows recreational drug use CAN be bad, we have all seen examples of it, and so the existence of recreational drug abuse is self evident. There are two aspects of recreational drug abuse which can be harmful: physical harm to the body, and the imposition of mental states not conducive to improving one's life situation.
Not all recreational drug use is bad. The person who has a glass of wine before dinner may even be doing a healthy thing. The person who drinks a moderate amount of alcohol in social situations is not likely to harm their health or life situation. The alcoholic, however, manages to endanger both their health and their life situation. So recreational drug abuse does not follow the all or none law. For the most part the typical attitude toward recreational drug use is one of two venues; I do not abuse the recreational drug I use so it should not be made illegal and I am not responsible for those who cannot use it correctly---and the other venue is "It is my body and I will do what I want with it". If the drug in question is a drug which is not a long standing drug of popular choice then most everyone wants it banned. Period.
All recreational drug use is done to alter our mental states. People don't spend money on recreational drugs if the use produces no desirable effects. And if the effects are not desired or needed, the person doesn't use the drug. It is really not that much more complicated. The next question is what effects? We take recreational drugs to stimulate a more exciting mood, to alter reality in subtle ways, to reduce pain, to make us more mellow or sociable, to relieve inhibitions, and to relieve stress. At first glance all of this seems reasonable enough, like let's all just make our lives for the better using recreational drugs. But using recreational drugs only makes sense if the person's life really improves with the use of the drug in question.
Thus, each person has to ask themselves if they are physically harming their body by introducing a toxic substance into their system, and if so, just how toxic is the substance. The second question each person need ask themselves is just what effect does using the drug have on their real life situation. Notice none of these questions involve criminality. To treat anyone as a criminal with these kind of decisions is illogical. And when people make bad decisions in these areas they need medical help, not be forced to live in the shadows or jailed. If just one quarter of the money being spent on this so called War on Drugs were spent on treatment centers accessible to all who need help with recreational drug abuse, the drug problem in this country would be substantially reduced, criminal behavior in this country would be reduced, the poorest of the young would not be give long term jail sentences for selling others their recreational drug of choice, and urban/suburban/ rural ghettoes would become safer places to live with businesses more willing to exist in a safer environment.
Recreational drug abuse should not be treated as a criminal endeavor. Progress can only be made through education and medical treatment centers. When I first was asked to teach a Course entitled the Physiological Aspects of Drugs and Drug Abuse I was asked to do so because I was the only Physiologist on board who had ever taken a Pharmacophysiology course. It was the same course taught to medical students in Medical School. The trouble is, while it has changed a bit these days, until recently prospective doctors were given little information about the drugs of abuse. And the scientific literature about them, in terms of actual scientific studies, were hard to find---simply scarce. Why? Sadly, most all scientific studies in this country are funded by federal grants. And the federal government was not interested in any federal funding of studies involving the recreational drugs of abuse. Nixon tried that once in an attempt to bolster support for his newly launched Criminal War on Drugs. When the results were not politically helpful to this criminal approach to recreational drug abuse, he simply refused to accept the report and every President since has appointed Drug Czars whose only interest is waging a criminal War on Drugs. But studies have been done, if not often in this country, then abroad, and we are not exactly without any data about the physiological effects of these drugs.
Toxicity is relatively simple. We know how toxic each of the recreational drugs are to the body. And one must remember the most basic premise of drug use. All drugs have side effects. The question is always do the side effects out weigh the benefits? In order of toxicity, the most common drugs of abuse are listed as follows: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, marijuana, heroin. The less commonly used drugs have less extensive research but generally are quite toxic. In terms of deaths per year from use in the U.S. it goes as follows: (not current---1996)
Tobacco----419,000
Alcohol-----108,000
Alcohol mixed with other drugs----4,000
Heroin mixed with other drugs-----4,000
Cocaine------2,000
Marijuana---75
The figures above need further explanation. In 1990 one in five deaths in the U.S. were related to smoking. In Oregon it is required to list on a death certificate if smoking contributed to the death. This is where the 25% figure is arrived at. Note that Oregon collects $74 million in cigarette taxes and spends $634 million on smoking related health costs. Perhaps if a person has a right to do what they want to their body they have an obligation to pay the medical costs involved. Smoking is related to 30% of cancer deaths, 20% of deaths from Coronary Heart Disease, 80-90% of deaths from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The total health care costs in the U.S. is estimated to be $100 billion annually. All of these figures go back 10 years so are not recent ( I am retired now), but the general gist is still valid.
For alcohol roughly 10% of those who drink are alcoholics. Alcohol accounts for 40% of admissions to mental hospitals. However, it is not clear whether alcohol caused the mental illness or the mental illness caused them to become alcoholics. 50% of arrests in the U.S. involves alcohol. Half of fatal auto accidents are alcohol related. This figure may be down considerably now. In 50% of homicides either the victim or the slayer has measurable amounts of alcohol. Most people know alcohol is not particularly good for the liver, the stomach, the heart. At any rate, alcohol, when abused, can have substantial health and social effects on society.
With cocaine, 25 million people in the U.S. have tried it, and 1.6 million people are said to use it at least once a month. 5-20% of these are dependent on it. In some areas of South America 90% of adults chew on the leaves daily. Cocaine is used to create increased alertness and euphoria. With acute poisoning there can be respiratory or cardiac arrest. No real evidence exists that occasional use of small amts of cocaine is a threat to health. HOWEVER, the toxic reactions are unpredictable and can kill quickly via cardiac arrest. In one study, cocaine users earned 37% higher wages than non users. Of course one study proves little, just interesting.
Marijuana use is essentially a non health issue, at least compared to how one eats, how one exercises, etc. No one knows anyone who died from marijuana use. Our hospitals and mental institutions are not loaded with marijuana abusers. Marijuana is used because it at first produces mild stimulation followed by a feeling of well being and the person may become introspective, tranquil, or sometimes giddy/silly followed by mellowed silence. It may lead to a modest impairment of short term memory, probably because the person is less motivated to remember some things while high. They feel more like focusing on 'deeper' issues.
Heroin is basically non toxic simply because it is a natural body chemical. Heroin and morphine operate via the same receptors in the body. The body produces it's own endogenous opiates under certain conditions like severe stress, including long distance running. Yes, long distance runners do get an opiate high, which explains their devotion to running long distances. If someone dies from heroin use it is because they mixed it with another drug or they didn't take care of their health. More about heroin later. Let's just point out here that toxicity is not a problem with heroin.
At this point I need point out that except for a glass of red wine with my dinner I do not use any of the above drugs and essentially never have. This has nothing to do with anything other than I guess I get high enough without any assistance or am able to handle stress without additional assistance, or just basically prefer not to ingest drugs whose long term implications are uncertain.
Aside from toxicity, drug use can be addictive. Of course the question then is which drugs are most addictive? The answer is not simple. Addictiveness varies from person to person. Each of us, in our own way, are unique mental cases. Nevertheless, in general, rating addictiveness on a scale of 100, with 100 representing the greatest addictivenes, it would go roughly as follows:
Nicotine----100%
Crack Cocaine----98%
alcohol----80%
Heroin----80%
Cocaine---75%
Caffeine----70%
Marijuana---25%
But it is quite tricky to separate physical addictiveness and psychological addictiveness. Certainly nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, and alcohol produce predictable withdrawal symptoms. All recreational drugs of abuse act on neurotransmitters by either affecting neurotransmitter production, storage, rate of destruction, rate of reuptake, blocking receptors, blocking release, mimicking a neurotransmitter or potentiating the effects of a neurotransmitter.
It is important to keep in mind that people use recreational drugs to create a certain mental state, and if the mental state serves a valued purpose, then a person may strongly resist not using the drug and it has nothing to do with physical addiction. I will use heroin as the best example here. One cannot understand morphine/heroine use without first understanding that this drug is used to reduce pain---both physical pain and mental pain. The sensation of pain involves two separate pathways to the brain. These pathways serve two different purposes. One pathway simply identifies the type of pain. This is how we know what kind of pain we feel. The second pathway determines how we FEEL about the pain. The threshold for detecting whether we sense pain is about the same for all people. How people FEEL about the pain varies a lot. Morphine/heroin blocks the pathway which activates how we FEEL about pain. This is why morphine is so useful in medical situations. You can't give a patient something which simply blocks all pain because pain helps the doctor know what the situation is. When a patient says "I can't stand this pain" the doctor administers morphine/heroin and when he comes in the next day he might say, "Do you still feel pain" and the patient will respond, "the pain is still there but it doesn't bother me like before". Heroin and morphine are really wonderful drugs and you can see why the body will produce it's own morphine/heroin under certain conditions.
Early on politicians and the public at large decided that heroin and marijuana were 'bad' and 'dangerous' drugs. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to deter politicians from using this to win elections. The more a politician was willing to punish users or sellers of these drugs, the easier it was for them to get elected. And everyone knew, in their heart, that heroin was a drug of choice in the ghettoes and marijuana was a youth drug which led to more serious drug use. OF course these were simply beliefs, hardly the stuff to formulate policy. And thence the Drug War was commenced, and has proceeded to this day with Americans now having a greater percentage of our citizens in jail than any other country, our inner cities destroyed, and a huge expense to locate, arrest, and keep drug users and sellers in jail, out of sight . Aside from the cost of finding, arresting, and prosecuting all these people---mostly young people---it costs a good $30,000 a year to keep someone in jail. And the mandatory sentences now are up to 10 years. After ten years in a jail most any person emerging from jail has little future, for various reasons, and is most likely to be sent back to jail. The kid that sold others their recreational drugs thus becomes a permanent ward of the state at a cost of $30,000 a year with a ruined life. Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, locking up our young most in need of help.
But let us return to heroin and to a lesser extent marijuana. Because of the War on Drugs and all the misinformation it dispenses, for decades patients in hospitals were not allowed unlimited use of morphine to relive pain. The reason put forth was that the patient would become addicted to morphine/heroin and become a drug addict. And doctors knew no better because the medical curriculum did not not include any substantial scientific information about drugs of abuse. Only in the last ten years have patients finally been given as much morphine as they wish to relieve their pain. Here is the point to keep in mind. You take morphine/heroine to relieve how you feel about pain. When the pain is gone, there is no need to take morphine/heroine anymore. It is about as simple as that. During the Vietnam War a good percentage of soldiers used heroin on a regular basis. It was readily available and the soldiers used it. They sniffed it, they smoked it, they mainlined it. It was estimated that 10-50% of the soldiers used it and the percentage was higher on the front lines. Yet 8-12 months after returning home only 1-2% were still using heroin. It is not just physical pain that heroin relieves, but mental stress too. My guess is that those soldiers who use heroin to relieve the mental stress of their situation, if it is really bad, are less likely to suffer post traumatic stress syndrome when they come home. But that is just my guess. At any rate, heroin is a drug mostly of the ghetto because it relieves the mental stress of their environment. If you live a miserable life with no clear view of how to improve it, you then use heroin so you just don't care anymore, the stress of it all no longer BOTHERS you. But here is the clinker: IF YOUR BAD SITUATION NO LONGER BOTHERS YOU, YOU HAVE LOST SOME OF THE DRIVE TO IMPROVE YOUR SITUATION. Thus, heroin is not the solution, it is purely a palliative measure. Clearly, people, young and old, who live in the worst of our neighborhoods and family environments, need help and opportunities. That is the best way to spend money---to help them overcome their environmental situation. If society can't do that, then let them have their heroin, at least let them have relief from their feelings about their lives. If they are all doped up on heroin they at least are far less likely to be violent, and if they didn't have to pay underground prices in an illegal drug market, they wouldn't have to steal things to get the money to pay for the drugs.
As far as marijuana is concerned, only an indoctrinated fool would choose nicotine or binge drinking as the recreational drug of choice. If one feels a real need to relax, mellow out, to be more social, to settle your mind or get relief for a bit from stress, marijuana is a far better choice. And what people need to be educated about, from early age on, is that recreational drugs, if used intelligently, can only be temporary lifts to your mental state, that real progress in anyone's life depends on serious attention to the stresses in one's life. In a caring, healthy society---certainly in the richest society on earth---any citizen should be able to go to drug abuse centers and get help to reduce the stresses in their lives so they can turn their lives for the better and become productive responsible citizens, spouses, parents, and workers.
The current War on Drugs is, and has been for 40 years, a page right out of the dark ages---a perfect example of where ignorance has ruled and justice denied to those most in need. So where is this all heading? Perhaps if this War on Drugs was not overshadowed by so many other pressing needs----pollution, depleting natural resources, depleting water supplies, overpopulation, use of violence to resolve global conflicts, the use of world wide 'slave labor' to produce cheap goods for the affluent, etc.-----maybe if all these issues were not in our face big time, then maybe the War on Drugs would get attention. This same sort of dilemma occurred back in the twenties when 'for the good of the people' alcohol was made illegal. After ten years of turmoil similar to the turmoil with the present War on Drugs, alcohol was made legal and things settled down. It is not like no one understands the folly of our current War on Drugs. A few Congressmen, Barry Goldwater, Walter Cronkite, and others I forget right now, see or saw the picture in realistic terms. If just marijuana were made legal the traffic in drugs would drop significantly. It is the sale of marijuana which makes the whole trafficking in drugs so lucrative. The only hope for any sanity and forthrightness in this area of recreational drug abuse lies in the ever growing need for Government money on other matters. At some point maybe Obama will realize how expensive this War on Drugs really is, and take steps to dismantle it and replace it with treatment centers as part of a total health care package. If marijuana were legal and taxed this also would add a lot of money to the Government coffers. Many foreign governments, especially in South America and parts of Asia would not be terrorized by drug cartels if some drugs were made legal. The jail population in this country would drop substantially. Our urban ghettoes would become safer and businesses have a chance to locate in areas now off limits due to the violence associated with drug trafficking. The door to participating in illegal drug sales would be closed to young people in our rural, suburban, and urban ghettoes, and there would be help centers instead to assimilate these forgotten 'nothingburgers' into productive employment and help them become responsible citizens. But of course none of this can really happen until there are global minimum wages so that those who work to produce the products we buy are making living wages, and themselves can afford to buy things and have things. Slavery in this country is not dead---it has just been moved offshore in the name of unrestricted capitalism----and all countries, including our own country, are being moved into third world economies in which a small privileged wealthy class acquires more and more wealth off the backs of slave labor. If anything is going to bring total global chaos, this will. And if overpopulation cannot be successfully addressed, nothing else----nothing else---really matters in the not so long run.
Welcome to the Presidency Mr. Obama.
Periodically I feel the need to blast away at our now 40 years old War on Drugs. To deal adequately with this topic takes a whole book---a few responsible such books have been written but little read. To write a short musing on this topic requires the kind of condensation most difficult to achieve, especially for a wind bag like me. With many problems I like to start with Lincoln's wisdom on approaching a problem: "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it."
After 40 yrs of our expensive War on Drugs, just where are we? The U.S., of all the modern industrialized nations, has the greatest percentage of people in jail for drug use or trafficking, has created more urban and suburban ghettoes as a consequence of this War, and has a recreational drug abuse level as high or higher than these other industrialized countries. Why then do we continue a War which, after 40 years, has achieved little---if anything---and permanently destroys the life of so many young people most in need of help? When it comes to recreational drug abuse we live in the Dark Ages, a most unenlightened stubborn adherence to politically and religiously instilled fabricated notions.
We cannot responsibly confront recreational drug abuse until we understand what constitutes drug abuse and why people abuse recreational drugs. Everyone knows recreational drug use CAN be bad, we have all seen examples of it, and so the existence of recreational drug abuse is self evident. There are two aspects of recreational drug abuse which can be harmful: physical harm to the body, and the imposition of mental states not conducive to improving one's life situation.
Not all recreational drug use is bad. The person who has a glass of wine before dinner may even be doing a healthy thing. The person who drinks a moderate amount of alcohol in social situations is not likely to harm their health or life situation. The alcoholic, however, manages to endanger both their health and their life situation. So recreational drug abuse does not follow the all or none law. For the most part the typical attitude toward recreational drug use is one of two venues; I do not abuse the recreational drug I use so it should not be made illegal and I am not responsible for those who cannot use it correctly---and the other venue is "It is my body and I will do what I want with it". If the drug in question is a drug which is not a long standing drug of popular choice then most everyone wants it banned. Period.
All recreational drug use is done to alter our mental states. People don't spend money on recreational drugs if the use produces no desirable effects. And if the effects are not desired or needed, the person doesn't use the drug. It is really not that much more complicated. The next question is what effects? We take recreational drugs to stimulate a more exciting mood, to alter reality in subtle ways, to reduce pain, to make us more mellow or sociable, to relieve inhibitions, and to relieve stress. At first glance all of this seems reasonable enough, like let's all just make our lives for the better using recreational drugs. But using recreational drugs only makes sense if the person's life really improves with the use of the drug in question.
Thus, each person has to ask themselves if they are physically harming their body by introducing a toxic substance into their system, and if so, just how toxic is the substance. The second question each person need ask themselves is just what effect does using the drug have on their real life situation. Notice none of these questions involve criminality. To treat anyone as a criminal with these kind of decisions is illogical. And when people make bad decisions in these areas they need medical help, not be forced to live in the shadows or jailed. If just one quarter of the money being spent on this so called War on Drugs were spent on treatment centers accessible to all who need help with recreational drug abuse, the drug problem in this country would be substantially reduced, criminal behavior in this country would be reduced, the poorest of the young would not be give long term jail sentences for selling others their recreational drug of choice, and urban/suburban/ rural ghettoes would become safer places to live with businesses more willing to exist in a safer environment.
Recreational drug abuse should not be treated as a criminal endeavor. Progress can only be made through education and medical treatment centers. When I first was asked to teach a Course entitled the Physiological Aspects of Drugs and Drug Abuse I was asked to do so because I was the only Physiologist on board who had ever taken a Pharmacophysiology course. It was the same course taught to medical students in Medical School. The trouble is, while it has changed a bit these days, until recently prospective doctors were given little information about the drugs of abuse. And the scientific literature about them, in terms of actual scientific studies, were hard to find---simply scarce. Why? Sadly, most all scientific studies in this country are funded by federal grants. And the federal government was not interested in any federal funding of studies involving the recreational drugs of abuse. Nixon tried that once in an attempt to bolster support for his newly launched Criminal War on Drugs. When the results were not politically helpful to this criminal approach to recreational drug abuse, he simply refused to accept the report and every President since has appointed Drug Czars whose only interest is waging a criminal War on Drugs. But studies have been done, if not often in this country, then abroad, and we are not exactly without any data about the physiological effects of these drugs.
Toxicity is relatively simple. We know how toxic each of the recreational drugs are to the body. And one must remember the most basic premise of drug use. All drugs have side effects. The question is always do the side effects out weigh the benefits? In order of toxicity, the most common drugs of abuse are listed as follows: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, marijuana, heroin. The less commonly used drugs have less extensive research but generally are quite toxic. In terms of deaths per year from use in the U.S. it goes as follows: (not current---1996)
Tobacco----419,000
Alcohol-----108,000
Alcohol mixed with other drugs----4,000
Heroin mixed with other drugs-----4,000
Cocaine------2,000
Marijuana---75
The figures above need further explanation. In 1990 one in five deaths in the U.S. were related to smoking. In Oregon it is required to list on a death certificate if smoking contributed to the death. This is where the 25% figure is arrived at. Note that Oregon collects $74 million in cigarette taxes and spends $634 million on smoking related health costs. Perhaps if a person has a right to do what they want to their body they have an obligation to pay the medical costs involved. Smoking is related to 30% of cancer deaths, 20% of deaths from Coronary Heart Disease, 80-90% of deaths from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The total health care costs in the U.S. is estimated to be $100 billion annually. All of these figures go back 10 years so are not recent ( I am retired now), but the general gist is still valid.
For alcohol roughly 10% of those who drink are alcoholics. Alcohol accounts for 40% of admissions to mental hospitals. However, it is not clear whether alcohol caused the mental illness or the mental illness caused them to become alcoholics. 50% of arrests in the U.S. involves alcohol. Half of fatal auto accidents are alcohol related. This figure may be down considerably now. In 50% of homicides either the victim or the slayer has measurable amounts of alcohol. Most people know alcohol is not particularly good for the liver, the stomach, the heart. At any rate, alcohol, when abused, can have substantial health and social effects on society.
With cocaine, 25 million people in the U.S. have tried it, and 1.6 million people are said to use it at least once a month. 5-20% of these are dependent on it. In some areas of South America 90% of adults chew on the leaves daily. Cocaine is used to create increased alertness and euphoria. With acute poisoning there can be respiratory or cardiac arrest. No real evidence exists that occasional use of small amts of cocaine is a threat to health. HOWEVER, the toxic reactions are unpredictable and can kill quickly via cardiac arrest. In one study, cocaine users earned 37% higher wages than non users. Of course one study proves little, just interesting.
Marijuana use is essentially a non health issue, at least compared to how one eats, how one exercises, etc. No one knows anyone who died from marijuana use. Our hospitals and mental institutions are not loaded with marijuana abusers. Marijuana is used because it at first produces mild stimulation followed by a feeling of well being and the person may become introspective, tranquil, or sometimes giddy/silly followed by mellowed silence. It may lead to a modest impairment of short term memory, probably because the person is less motivated to remember some things while high. They feel more like focusing on 'deeper' issues.
Heroin is basically non toxic simply because it is a natural body chemical. Heroin and morphine operate via the same receptors in the body. The body produces it's own endogenous opiates under certain conditions like severe stress, including long distance running. Yes, long distance runners do get an opiate high, which explains their devotion to running long distances. If someone dies from heroin use it is because they mixed it with another drug or they didn't take care of their health. More about heroin later. Let's just point out here that toxicity is not a problem with heroin.
At this point I need point out that except for a glass of red wine with my dinner I do not use any of the above drugs and essentially never have. This has nothing to do with anything other than I guess I get high enough without any assistance or am able to handle stress without additional assistance, or just basically prefer not to ingest drugs whose long term implications are uncertain.
Aside from toxicity, drug use can be addictive. Of course the question then is which drugs are most addictive? The answer is not simple. Addictiveness varies from person to person. Each of us, in our own way, are unique mental cases. Nevertheless, in general, rating addictiveness on a scale of 100, with 100 representing the greatest addictivenes, it would go roughly as follows:
Nicotine----100%
Crack Cocaine----98%
alcohol----80%
Heroin----80%
Cocaine---75%
Caffeine----70%
Marijuana---25%
But it is quite tricky to separate physical addictiveness and psychological addictiveness. Certainly nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, and alcohol produce predictable withdrawal symptoms. All recreational drugs of abuse act on neurotransmitters by either affecting neurotransmitter production, storage, rate of destruction, rate of reuptake, blocking receptors, blocking release, mimicking a neurotransmitter or potentiating the effects of a neurotransmitter.
It is important to keep in mind that people use recreational drugs to create a certain mental state, and if the mental state serves a valued purpose, then a person may strongly resist not using the drug and it has nothing to do with physical addiction. I will use heroin as the best example here. One cannot understand morphine/heroine use without first understanding that this drug is used to reduce pain---both physical pain and mental pain. The sensation of pain involves two separate pathways to the brain. These pathways serve two different purposes. One pathway simply identifies the type of pain. This is how we know what kind of pain we feel. The second pathway determines how we FEEL about the pain. The threshold for detecting whether we sense pain is about the same for all people. How people FEEL about the pain varies a lot. Morphine/heroin blocks the pathway which activates how we FEEL about pain. This is why morphine is so useful in medical situations. You can't give a patient something which simply blocks all pain because pain helps the doctor know what the situation is. When a patient says "I can't stand this pain" the doctor administers morphine/heroin and when he comes in the next day he might say, "Do you still feel pain" and the patient will respond, "the pain is still there but it doesn't bother me like before". Heroin and morphine are really wonderful drugs and you can see why the body will produce it's own morphine/heroin under certain conditions.
Early on politicians and the public at large decided that heroin and marijuana were 'bad' and 'dangerous' drugs. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to deter politicians from using this to win elections. The more a politician was willing to punish users or sellers of these drugs, the easier it was for them to get elected. And everyone knew, in their heart, that heroin was a drug of choice in the ghettoes and marijuana was a youth drug which led to more serious drug use. OF course these were simply beliefs, hardly the stuff to formulate policy. And thence the Drug War was commenced, and has proceeded to this day with Americans now having a greater percentage of our citizens in jail than any other country, our inner cities destroyed, and a huge expense to locate, arrest, and keep drug users and sellers in jail, out of sight . Aside from the cost of finding, arresting, and prosecuting all these people---mostly young people---it costs a good $30,000 a year to keep someone in jail. And the mandatory sentences now are up to 10 years. After ten years in a jail most any person emerging from jail has little future, for various reasons, and is most likely to be sent back to jail. The kid that sold others their recreational drugs thus becomes a permanent ward of the state at a cost of $30,000 a year with a ruined life. Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, locking up our young most in need of help.
But let us return to heroin and to a lesser extent marijuana. Because of the War on Drugs and all the misinformation it dispenses, for decades patients in hospitals were not allowed unlimited use of morphine to relive pain. The reason put forth was that the patient would become addicted to morphine/heroin and become a drug addict. And doctors knew no better because the medical curriculum did not not include any substantial scientific information about drugs of abuse. Only in the last ten years have patients finally been given as much morphine as they wish to relieve their pain. Here is the point to keep in mind. You take morphine/heroine to relieve how you feel about pain. When the pain is gone, there is no need to take morphine/heroine anymore. It is about as simple as that. During the Vietnam War a good percentage of soldiers used heroin on a regular basis. It was readily available and the soldiers used it. They sniffed it, they smoked it, they mainlined it. It was estimated that 10-50% of the soldiers used it and the percentage was higher on the front lines. Yet 8-12 months after returning home only 1-2% were still using heroin. It is not just physical pain that heroin relieves, but mental stress too. My guess is that those soldiers who use heroin to relieve the mental stress of their situation, if it is really bad, are less likely to suffer post traumatic stress syndrome when they come home. But that is just my guess. At any rate, heroin is a drug mostly of the ghetto because it relieves the mental stress of their environment. If you live a miserable life with no clear view of how to improve it, you then use heroin so you just don't care anymore, the stress of it all no longer BOTHERS you. But here is the clinker: IF YOUR BAD SITUATION NO LONGER BOTHERS YOU, YOU HAVE LOST SOME OF THE DRIVE TO IMPROVE YOUR SITUATION. Thus, heroin is not the solution, it is purely a palliative measure. Clearly, people, young and old, who live in the worst of our neighborhoods and family environments, need help and opportunities. That is the best way to spend money---to help them overcome their environmental situation. If society can't do that, then let them have their heroin, at least let them have relief from their feelings about their lives. If they are all doped up on heroin they at least are far less likely to be violent, and if they didn't have to pay underground prices in an illegal drug market, they wouldn't have to steal things to get the money to pay for the drugs.
As far as marijuana is concerned, only an indoctrinated fool would choose nicotine or binge drinking as the recreational drug of choice. If one feels a real need to relax, mellow out, to be more social, to settle your mind or get relief for a bit from stress, marijuana is a far better choice. And what people need to be educated about, from early age on, is that recreational drugs, if used intelligently, can only be temporary lifts to your mental state, that real progress in anyone's life depends on serious attention to the stresses in one's life. In a caring, healthy society---certainly in the richest society on earth---any citizen should be able to go to drug abuse centers and get help to reduce the stresses in their lives so they can turn their lives for the better and become productive responsible citizens, spouses, parents, and workers.
The current War on Drugs is, and has been for 40 years, a page right out of the dark ages---a perfect example of where ignorance has ruled and justice denied to those most in need. So where is this all heading? Perhaps if this War on Drugs was not overshadowed by so many other pressing needs----pollution, depleting natural resources, depleting water supplies, overpopulation, use of violence to resolve global conflicts, the use of world wide 'slave labor' to produce cheap goods for the affluent, etc.-----maybe if all these issues were not in our face big time, then maybe the War on Drugs would get attention. This same sort of dilemma occurred back in the twenties when 'for the good of the people' alcohol was made illegal. After ten years of turmoil similar to the turmoil with the present War on Drugs, alcohol was made legal and things settled down. It is not like no one understands the folly of our current War on Drugs. A few Congressmen, Barry Goldwater, Walter Cronkite, and others I forget right now, see or saw the picture in realistic terms. If just marijuana were made legal the traffic in drugs would drop significantly. It is the sale of marijuana which makes the whole trafficking in drugs so lucrative. The only hope for any sanity and forthrightness in this area of recreational drug abuse lies in the ever growing need for Government money on other matters. At some point maybe Obama will realize how expensive this War on Drugs really is, and take steps to dismantle it and replace it with treatment centers as part of a total health care package. If marijuana were legal and taxed this also would add a lot of money to the Government coffers. Many foreign governments, especially in South America and parts of Asia would not be terrorized by drug cartels if some drugs were made legal. The jail population in this country would drop substantially. Our urban ghettoes would become safer and businesses have a chance to locate in areas now off limits due to the violence associated with drug trafficking. The door to participating in illegal drug sales would be closed to young people in our rural, suburban, and urban ghettoes, and there would be help centers instead to assimilate these forgotten 'nothingburgers' into productive employment and help them become responsible citizens. But of course none of this can really happen until there are global minimum wages so that those who work to produce the products we buy are making living wages, and themselves can afford to buy things and have things. Slavery in this country is not dead---it has just been moved offshore in the name of unrestricted capitalism----and all countries, including our own country, are being moved into third world economies in which a small privileged wealthy class acquires more and more wealth off the backs of slave labor. If anything is going to bring total global chaos, this will. And if overpopulation cannot be successfully addressed, nothing else----nothing else---really matters in the not so long run.
Welcome to the Presidency Mr. Obama.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A FINAL WORD
A Final Word:
Clearing out your file cabinets brings you across a few things you want to save for sentimental reasons. I was a Professor of Physiology for 25 years and I always felt being around young college students was a perfect atmosphere for me. But my nature is such that when something is over it is over. Period. Recreating the past is futile. If the past was good, that to me is hitting a home run and the good from the past is what you still carry with you. Below is the front page of a final exam in a Physiology course I taught which seems worth preserving some place, so I put it in here where so many of my thoughts are stored. As I recall this particular Final Word was the one the most students requested to separate from the final exam and take home. It is as follows:
A FINAL WORD FROM YOUR INSTRUCTOR
"Now the END IS UPON US, and so we face the final curtain. We have been like ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing: Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness: So on the oceans of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence." (Longfellow)
For those of you who are young, as your world expands you will see SO MANY PEOPLE, SO MANY OPINIONS. Nevertheless, I encourage you to adopt an EXPANSIVE philosophy and not be CONSUMED by conflict. In this little chapter of your life you have toiled to learn some basic principles of physiology. To some, I suppose, this course has just been one damn thing after another. And sometimes, to me, it seems instructors are the bones on which students sharpen their teeth. This has been a personable class with ample talent and I believe most of you have given a reasonable effort, albeit in many cases far short of your real capabilities. Some will achieve their current objectives in life; others will change course, but ALL OF YOU can find a fulfilling niche in life. I like to keep things simple. There is SO MUCH GOOD in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." (Hoch) My final advice to all of you is DON'T STAND STILL and passively watch the world go by, because if you do---IT WILL.
"It is not doing the thing we like to do but liking the thing we have to do that makes life get better. We do our work and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't we feel low. We pause for a moment, say a prayer in church, drink a beer in the backyard, go to a psychiatrist, or smoke grass if we are young. The granite mass of time cracks and we feel wonder at the world. WE GO ON." (Taylor) As time passes you will eventually realize THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN'T THINGS. Be afraid only of standing still, for the "greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." (Confucius)
As a student in a course don't wait for the final judgment---it takes place every day with every assignment---and every little corner cut, every little task slighted, can begin a slide from which there is no recovery. "Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are. Either you acknowledge reality and use it to your benefit, or it will automatically work against you" (Ringer). This is the END OF THE COURSE, but this course is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the END OF THE BEGINNING.
"There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it's natural and good and it evolved that way by itself, it's got to be cherished and if we think like that and live that kind of life, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation." (Davis)
Clearing out your file cabinets brings you across a few things you want to save for sentimental reasons. I was a Professor of Physiology for 25 years and I always felt being around young college students was a perfect atmosphere for me. But my nature is such that when something is over it is over. Period. Recreating the past is futile. If the past was good, that to me is hitting a home run and the good from the past is what you still carry with you. Below is the front page of a final exam in a Physiology course I taught which seems worth preserving some place, so I put it in here where so many of my thoughts are stored. As I recall this particular Final Word was the one the most students requested to separate from the final exam and take home. It is as follows:
A FINAL WORD FROM YOUR INSTRUCTOR
"Now the END IS UPON US, and so we face the final curtain. We have been like ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing: Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness: So on the oceans of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence." (Longfellow)
For those of you who are young, as your world expands you will see SO MANY PEOPLE, SO MANY OPINIONS. Nevertheless, I encourage you to adopt an EXPANSIVE philosophy and not be CONSUMED by conflict. In this little chapter of your life you have toiled to learn some basic principles of physiology. To some, I suppose, this course has just been one damn thing after another. And sometimes, to me, it seems instructors are the bones on which students sharpen their teeth. This has been a personable class with ample talent and I believe most of you have given a reasonable effort, albeit in many cases far short of your real capabilities. Some will achieve their current objectives in life; others will change course, but ALL OF YOU can find a fulfilling niche in life. I like to keep things simple. There is SO MUCH GOOD in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." (Hoch) My final advice to all of you is DON'T STAND STILL and passively watch the world go by, because if you do---IT WILL.
"It is not doing the thing we like to do but liking the thing we have to do that makes life get better. We do our work and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't we feel low. We pause for a moment, say a prayer in church, drink a beer in the backyard, go to a psychiatrist, or smoke grass if we are young. The granite mass of time cracks and we feel wonder at the world. WE GO ON." (Taylor) As time passes you will eventually realize THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN'T THINGS. Be afraid only of standing still, for the "greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." (Confucius)
As a student in a course don't wait for the final judgment---it takes place every day with every assignment---and every little corner cut, every little task slighted, can begin a slide from which there is no recovery. "Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are. Either you acknowledge reality and use it to your benefit, or it will automatically work against you" (Ringer). This is the END OF THE COURSE, but this course is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the END OF THE BEGINNING.
"There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it's natural and good and it evolved that way by itself, it's got to be cherished and if we think like that and live that kind of life, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation." (Davis)
Monday, November 10, 2008
THINGS
I wrote this back in March 2002 before this blog. It is one of my favorites so wanted to get it put on here with a few changes.
I know what is the matter with the world. It finally has come to me. So I am going to share this finding with you. It's THINGS, that's what the matter with this whole world. Everyone wants THINGS and then more THINGS, until it becomes a universal obsession to acquire more and more THINGS, independent of any real need, irrespective of any negative impact on future generations, and independent of any moral imperative to share all these THINGS with others, unless it is our own family----then it is a high priority to pass on all our THINGS to them, lest they are not too good at acquiring THINGS and need help accumulating more THINGS.
Acquiring THINGS has always been a priority. It helps define how important you are. But in the past there were not that many THINGS to acquire, the game was simpler and certainly not as time consuming. I think if you gave me a month I probably would not be able to identify all the THINGS I would like to have just for the asking. Maybe the greatest reason to go off and live in the hills is to escape the obsession for THINGS. Like dry out and recuperate. Some times it is painful to go into a store. I may go in contented, not to the point of purring like Keisha my cat, maybe with just a vacant-minded Texan smile, but after I get in the store I suddenly realize I need THINGS, more THINGS, even if just newer models. There I am, face to face, with a new THING or a bigger THING, or a more complicated THING, or a neater looking THING, or some THING that my neighbor has that I don't. I then realize I too can have that THING. But truthfully, the excitement of acquiring the THING is nothing like, when as a kid, I got an inexpensive THING. Even a new car worth tens of thousands of dollars is only mildly exciting for a couple of weeks and then it is just another car, a THING to get from here to there.
Americans seem to be the best at acquiring THINGS, and now we have learned that we don't really have to do anyTHING to get THINGS---not hard labor, or invent anyTHING, or produce ANYTHING, or fix THINGS, or build THINGS---just speculate on THINGS or inherit THINGS. The new wealthy class of people, in most cases, get there today by simply speculating on stocks/other THINGS, or THINGS via the graveyard. Unfortunately, most of the THINGS we seek require the expenditure of natural resources and energy fuels. Since these these THINGs are available in limited quantity, everyone on this globe cannot have all the THINGS others do. It is not really a question of economic policy or the political structure of a government, there simply are not enough natural resources for everyone in the world to live in the THING-style most Americans live. In fact, us fortunate ones cannot have as many THINGS as we do unless we can buy THINGS cheap. Fortunately, those in other countries who have noTHING will work for next to noTHING so they can at least maybe have someTHING rather than noTHING, which gives us an abundance of cheap THINGS. These are the world's noTHING burgers.
In Lincoln's day up to 10 people lived together in a small one or two room cabin, about the size of a small modern garage. I wonder what their average 'happiness' quotient was compared to the average today? And really, suppose ten of us decided to live together in one of these 1820 homes, where would we put all our THINGS? If so many people, most all in the past, and billions today, have so few THINGS, what the hell do they do with their time? You know, like the millions who are homeless/landless or in refugee camps across the globe or live in our urban and rural ghettoes----who have so few THINGS----what the hell do they do with themselves all day? I guess they socialize with each other unless they are slave laborers, mostly earning non living wages, in which case they probably just work and sleep. I think, up to a point, that human socialization is inversely proportional to the number of THINGS you have. In fact, if you have a lot of THINGS then you really don't want a lot of people wandering among your THINGS, especially if fellow THING chasers haven't been vetted and you are not going to be present. After all, they are probably just like us and like THINGS a lot, and maybe like THINGS enough to take THINGS for themselves. THINGS come with a burden. THINGS need to be maintained and often fixed. THINGS need guarding. THINGS need space. THINGS wear out and need to be replaced. THINGS generate the need for more THINGS. THINGS get outdated and updated THINGS then are needed, and THINGS require our time to use. It doesn't make sense to acquire a THING and not spend time with it. Insanely, most of us now have so many THINGS that we can't spend time with all our THINGS and so most of our THINGS just pretty much sit there. We spend time storing THINGS we are not currently using until we eventually throw these THINGS out and replace them with new THINGS to be stored there. THING storage is a major THING in our THING lives. Who would want to suddenly fiddle with some old THING when there are so many new THINGS to fiddle with?
While things are obviously important to all of us, people with the most THINGS tend to be the least ones we enjoy visiting. In many cases it is the people with the least THINGS who have the greatest traffic in and out of their scarce THINGless abode. The most 'fun' people to be around usually don't have a lot of THINGS, at least compared to others. TO visit someone with a lot of THINGS usually requires a special event, a special invitation, and the best guarded conversation you can manage. Look, don't touch THINGS, and look especially awed as the grand tour of THINGS takes up most of the visit. When you get home you can scheme just how you too can acquire some of those THINGS you saw during the THING visit. Do you ever get the urge, while on the grand tour, to just start smashing some THINGS? I do, but a person of my stature has control of himself, except maybe my mouth and I can't smash THINGS with my mouth.
THINGS help you rise to become a THING of more importance in society. If you have enough THINGS then you become titled more and get to be Honorary members of this or that. A pile of THINGS will usually get you more visits from ministers or priests or rabbis and, as a person of THINGS, you will generate a crowd at social or business events who want to be known as a friend of Mr. or Ms. THING. Of course people with THINGS protect other people with THINGS, a kind of THING protection club. Those with a lot of THINGS will find an endless array of tax loopholes, tax breaks, tax incentives, tax refunds, tax deferments, tax shelters along with the finest lawyers THINGS can attract. Paying a lot of taxes on your THINGS is a dumb THING. There are other THINGS more important than the tax THING. And if you break the law, a most difficult THING for a person of many THINGS to ever be found guilty of---even murder---you will then be housed in a low risk, high THING content residential facility for high THING criminals. Crime for a high THING persons is rarely any big THING. Unregulated capitalism is defined by high THING capitalists as a good THING. During hard economic times the government will always find a way to give those with many THINGS more money so that they will then buy more THINGS and, according to the high intensity THING theory, wealth will then trickle down by diffusion. Just in case those with many THINGS decide to hoard money instead of buying THINGS during depressed times, low interest rates will then be available for people with few THINGS, so that they can purchase THINGS with no money down and no payments for these THINGS until the value of the purchased THINGS rise with better economic times, and then those THINGS will get foreclosed at bargain prices to those who already have many THINGS, including those THINGS the government gave them during the economic depression. So with time THINGS accumulate to those with the most THINGS until 1% of the people in the U.S. own 90% of the wealth n' THINGS. It is a kind of THING reproduction gone wild.
It is not love which makes the world go round. It is THINGS, and love is often enough a vehicle used for acquiring THINGS. Marrying up is a good THING if you like THINGS. Sometimes, it is like a smart monopoly move THING---the marriage only has to be a temporary THING, then half of the THINGS will be yours minus the former obligatory sex THING. THINGS drive almost everyTHING. Organized religion loves impressive THINGS, especially elaborate cathedrals, and many a congregation spends almost all their charitable efforts on contributing for building impressive glittering THINGS. Certainly God must like THINGS too and will be impressed. We don't build these THINGS because we like glittering THINGS, we build them because God will be grateful we have built him gigantic gilded THINGS---it is all there in scripture---I guess.
In the end THINGS can be a problem. Offspring or relatives usually have a keen interest in the THINGS of elderly relatives. Fortunately for those in their terminational years the value of THINGS to them often declines. Most of those who live to be old lose much of their interest in acquiring THINGS. THINGS no longer mean as much to them, and they often resist suggestions that they buy new or better THINGS. When pressed to buy this or that THING they invariably say, "What for"? The best value of THINGS to the elderly is the the slow distribution of THINGS to their relatives which can increase the frequency of visitations by these relatives. Once these kin express an interest in someTHING the elderly relative has, a visit will not be far behind. This increased visitation rate works best when there is competition for the THINGS. The down side is that nothing in life can succeed so well to break up a family as an inheritance battle over THINGS. Death, like it or not, admit it or not----is an unique opportunity to get THINGS for nothing, tax free usually, as opposed to getting things by working for them. Still, those who inherit THINGS of any quantity, rarely seem to achieve much on their own, or to seem particularly content about much of their inherited THINGS. It just seems, in most cases, that if one does not really earn someTHING, then that THING doesn't have the same THING value. And really, how much of the respect THING does anyone deserve whose THINGS are inherited THINGS?
In the end does any THING matter? Is an after life noTHING? Isn't faith and hope someTHING? I doubt God is a THING. At least no THING we can comprehend as a someTHING. Believing God created us, especially those other human THINGS in His image, seems a delusional THING. So, in the last analysis there are some THINGS beyond THINGS which human THINGS can know noTHING. I hope all of this is a perfectly clear THING.
I know what is the matter with the world. It finally has come to me. So I am going to share this finding with you. It's THINGS, that's what the matter with this whole world. Everyone wants THINGS and then more THINGS, until it becomes a universal obsession to acquire more and more THINGS, independent of any real need, irrespective of any negative impact on future generations, and independent of any moral imperative to share all these THINGS with others, unless it is our own family----then it is a high priority to pass on all our THINGS to them, lest they are not too good at acquiring THINGS and need help accumulating more THINGS.
Acquiring THINGS has always been a priority. It helps define how important you are. But in the past there were not that many THINGS to acquire, the game was simpler and certainly not as time consuming. I think if you gave me a month I probably would not be able to identify all the THINGS I would like to have just for the asking. Maybe the greatest reason to go off and live in the hills is to escape the obsession for THINGS. Like dry out and recuperate. Some times it is painful to go into a store. I may go in contented, not to the point of purring like Keisha my cat, maybe with just a vacant-minded Texan smile, but after I get in the store I suddenly realize I need THINGS, more THINGS, even if just newer models. There I am, face to face, with a new THING or a bigger THING, or a more complicated THING, or a neater looking THING, or some THING that my neighbor has that I don't. I then realize I too can have that THING. But truthfully, the excitement of acquiring the THING is nothing like, when as a kid, I got an inexpensive THING. Even a new car worth tens of thousands of dollars is only mildly exciting for a couple of weeks and then it is just another car, a THING to get from here to there.
Americans seem to be the best at acquiring THINGS, and now we have learned that we don't really have to do anyTHING to get THINGS---not hard labor, or invent anyTHING, or produce ANYTHING, or fix THINGS, or build THINGS---just speculate on THINGS or inherit THINGS. The new wealthy class of people, in most cases, get there today by simply speculating on stocks/other THINGS, or THINGS via the graveyard. Unfortunately, most of the THINGS we seek require the expenditure of natural resources and energy fuels. Since these these THINGs are available in limited quantity, everyone on this globe cannot have all the THINGS others do. It is not really a question of economic policy or the political structure of a government, there simply are not enough natural resources for everyone in the world to live in the THING-style most Americans live. In fact, us fortunate ones cannot have as many THINGS as we do unless we can buy THINGS cheap. Fortunately, those in other countries who have noTHING will work for next to noTHING so they can at least maybe have someTHING rather than noTHING, which gives us an abundance of cheap THINGS. These are the world's noTHING burgers.
In Lincoln's day up to 10 people lived together in a small one or two room cabin, about the size of a small modern garage. I wonder what their average 'happiness' quotient was compared to the average today? And really, suppose ten of us decided to live together in one of these 1820 homes, where would we put all our THINGS? If so many people, most all in the past, and billions today, have so few THINGS, what the hell do they do with their time? You know, like the millions who are homeless/landless or in refugee camps across the globe or live in our urban and rural ghettoes----who have so few THINGS----what the hell do they do with themselves all day? I guess they socialize with each other unless they are slave laborers, mostly earning non living wages, in which case they probably just work and sleep. I think, up to a point, that human socialization is inversely proportional to the number of THINGS you have. In fact, if you have a lot of THINGS then you really don't want a lot of people wandering among your THINGS, especially if fellow THING chasers haven't been vetted and you are not going to be present. After all, they are probably just like us and like THINGS a lot, and maybe like THINGS enough to take THINGS for themselves. THINGS come with a burden. THINGS need to be maintained and often fixed. THINGS need guarding. THINGS need space. THINGS wear out and need to be replaced. THINGS generate the need for more THINGS. THINGS get outdated and updated THINGS then are needed, and THINGS require our time to use. It doesn't make sense to acquire a THING and not spend time with it. Insanely, most of us now have so many THINGS that we can't spend time with all our THINGS and so most of our THINGS just pretty much sit there. We spend time storing THINGS we are not currently using until we eventually throw these THINGS out and replace them with new THINGS to be stored there. THING storage is a major THING in our THING lives. Who would want to suddenly fiddle with some old THING when there are so many new THINGS to fiddle with?
While things are obviously important to all of us, people with the most THINGS tend to be the least ones we enjoy visiting. In many cases it is the people with the least THINGS who have the greatest traffic in and out of their scarce THINGless abode. The most 'fun' people to be around usually don't have a lot of THINGS, at least compared to others. TO visit someone with a lot of THINGS usually requires a special event, a special invitation, and the best guarded conversation you can manage. Look, don't touch THINGS, and look especially awed as the grand tour of THINGS takes up most of the visit. When you get home you can scheme just how you too can acquire some of those THINGS you saw during the THING visit. Do you ever get the urge, while on the grand tour, to just start smashing some THINGS? I do, but a person of my stature has control of himself, except maybe my mouth and I can't smash THINGS with my mouth.
THINGS help you rise to become a THING of more importance in society. If you have enough THINGS then you become titled more and get to be Honorary members of this or that. A pile of THINGS will usually get you more visits from ministers or priests or rabbis and, as a person of THINGS, you will generate a crowd at social or business events who want to be known as a friend of Mr. or Ms. THING. Of course people with THINGS protect other people with THINGS, a kind of THING protection club. Those with a lot of THINGS will find an endless array of tax loopholes, tax breaks, tax incentives, tax refunds, tax deferments, tax shelters along with the finest lawyers THINGS can attract. Paying a lot of taxes on your THINGS is a dumb THING. There are other THINGS more important than the tax THING. And if you break the law, a most difficult THING for a person of many THINGS to ever be found guilty of---even murder---you will then be housed in a low risk, high THING content residential facility for high THING criminals. Crime for a high THING persons is rarely any big THING. Unregulated capitalism is defined by high THING capitalists as a good THING. During hard economic times the government will always find a way to give those with many THINGS more money so that they will then buy more THINGS and, according to the high intensity THING theory, wealth will then trickle down by diffusion. Just in case those with many THINGS decide to hoard money instead of buying THINGS during depressed times, low interest rates will then be available for people with few THINGS, so that they can purchase THINGS with no money down and no payments for these THINGS until the value of the purchased THINGS rise with better economic times, and then those THINGS will get foreclosed at bargain prices to those who already have many THINGS, including those THINGS the government gave them during the economic depression. So with time THINGS accumulate to those with the most THINGS until 1% of the people in the U.S. own 90% of the wealth n' THINGS. It is a kind of THING reproduction gone wild.
It is not love which makes the world go round. It is THINGS, and love is often enough a vehicle used for acquiring THINGS. Marrying up is a good THING if you like THINGS. Sometimes, it is like a smart monopoly move THING---the marriage only has to be a temporary THING, then half of the THINGS will be yours minus the former obligatory sex THING. THINGS drive almost everyTHING. Organized religion loves impressive THINGS, especially elaborate cathedrals, and many a congregation spends almost all their charitable efforts on contributing for building impressive glittering THINGS. Certainly God must like THINGS too and will be impressed. We don't build these THINGS because we like glittering THINGS, we build them because God will be grateful we have built him gigantic gilded THINGS---it is all there in scripture---I guess.
In the end THINGS can be a problem. Offspring or relatives usually have a keen interest in the THINGS of elderly relatives. Fortunately for those in their terminational years the value of THINGS to them often declines. Most of those who live to be old lose much of their interest in acquiring THINGS. THINGS no longer mean as much to them, and they often resist suggestions that they buy new or better THINGS. When pressed to buy this or that THING they invariably say, "What for"? The best value of THINGS to the elderly is the the slow distribution of THINGS to their relatives which can increase the frequency of visitations by these relatives. Once these kin express an interest in someTHING the elderly relative has, a visit will not be far behind. This increased visitation rate works best when there is competition for the THINGS. The down side is that nothing in life can succeed so well to break up a family as an inheritance battle over THINGS. Death, like it or not, admit it or not----is an unique opportunity to get THINGS for nothing, tax free usually, as opposed to getting things by working for them. Still, those who inherit THINGS of any quantity, rarely seem to achieve much on their own, or to seem particularly content about much of their inherited THINGS. It just seems, in most cases, that if one does not really earn someTHING, then that THING doesn't have the same THING value. And really, how much of the respect THING does anyone deserve whose THINGS are inherited THINGS?
In the end does any THING matter? Is an after life noTHING? Isn't faith and hope someTHING? I doubt God is a THING. At least no THING we can comprehend as a someTHING. Believing God created us, especially those other human THINGS in His image, seems a delusional THING. So, in the last analysis there are some THINGS beyond THINGS which human THINGS can know noTHING. I hope all of this is a perfectly clear THING.
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