The Solution
What do I want to celebrate in my life?
What do I care about in my life?
What do I love, what do I treasure?
People.
I love human beings- I want to emphasize and share my feeling.
That we are the most beautiful- the most important thing in this universe- to
each other- and that we must act in kind.
I was watching a series of documentaries by Errol Morris called ‘First
Person’.
One of the episodes is about ‘the smartest man in the world’. It’s a man who
has a high IQ. At some point it comes up that ‘what would you do if you could
rule the world’- because he is arguing that it is the smart people who should
run things, not the politicos, etc. And he says- he would cleanse the world of
stupid people bby not letting them reproduce- something to that extent.
So I was thinking, a few weeks later. What would I do?
What would I do, if I could control the world?
And I came up with the answer. I have a very real, very simple- very precise
answer that I am completely a believer of- my answer for the problems of the
entire human race is one I have absolute confidence in- without any doubt at
all. It’s something I know would work.
I would take spending for defense, infrastructure, health care.. Everything-
and I would put all of those things on the back burner.
I would make it the uncompromising first priority for our resources, to go to
education.
It is education that will solve the problems of the world- all of them.
Because it is education- that shows us each other. It is reading about the
people in the world and what they do and why they do it- that teaches us
compassion, love- for one another.
What I mean here of education- is most certainly not the usual math and
sciences curriculae.
The emphasis needs to be placed on.. Each other. Knowledge about who we are,
perhaps who we were- history. But most importantly- we need to be aware of who
our neighbors are- those closeby- and those on the other side of the world. We
need to know those people- what they aspire to- what they fear- what they hope
for- what hurts them- what they are angry sad happy and melancholy about.
We need to know about each other- all of us.
That is the first step- that is the solution to solve all other problems in
our civilizations.
It is because of what I know of prejudice- that I am willing to swallow my
very real fear in public and speak out against it. I know the price to pay for
letting people talk hate in public without opposition. I know that if someone
is in need out there on the street- they must be helped- in some way. I know
that if someone says out loud that blue people are evil- we must speak out and
say ‘no’- out loud- past the fear- past the embarrasment of attracting
attention to ourselves- past the desire to simply walk on with our lives. I
know that the price to pay for letting that kind of social disease fester
*will* be paid for with the blood of our children.
I know these things- because it was taught to me. It was taught to me by the
people around me today fighting for us all- by the people that came before me
and what they did to bring to our attention the injustice brought about by our
ignorance, greed, and neglect.
This knowledge comes from reading- from listening.
I don’t believe in genetic predisposition. I don’t believe in being born
anything. Good, bad, curious, loving.. Anything. Curiousity begat curiosity.
The more one learns about all of us, the more you want to know.
An interesting though occurred to me the other day. I though to myself-
wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to be here three or four thousand years
from now. I wish I could be here that long. Why?
Because I want to be able to read the history books- and see what we did.
I enjoy stories, movies- events. And the greatest story ever told- is the one
we are writing right now, as you are reading these words.
It’s a play- it’s a movie- all of it. And at any time you may rise up and try
to take a supporting role. Because there are no leading roles, not really.
The leading role is all of us as a whole- the play itself. The story itself.
And we can do with it whatever we want to. We can make this a tragedy or a
comedy. We can do whatever we want, nobody is stopping us. There is no
director- and every one of us is the writer. From the person at the store
begging for a few dollars to get something to eat- to the taxi driver- to the
lonely person living in wealth and isolation.
Education. Knowledge about us, about all of us. That will solve everything. It
will solve the social inequalities, it will solve the problem with global
warming, it will solve war. It will solve the mistreatment of animals. It will
solve our systems of government, it will solve our health care. Education,
knowledge about each other- will solve all of those things. All of them.
We know how to solve all of these problems, we really do.
The problem is not religion, the problem is not the medicinal establishment,
the problem is not capitalism, communism, democracy, socialism, our judicial
system, local government, federal government, the UN, the Euro, the CIA or the
FBI, Castro, or the corporation.
The problem is not our hierarchical systems of authority and services.
The problem is the people populating these stations.
People of greed and neglect and ignorance grabbing the steering wheels to our
systems are not an aberration. They are a mirror of what we let ourselves be-
at this moment. We need to empower ourselves from the ground up- not top down.
People are not sheep. They are not led. The word of the leader must be an echo
off the heart of every one of us.
We have to saturate, permeate our societies with curious people, with educated
human beings. Education and knowledge will self propagate into more curiosity
and deep inside- the average person will not be able to help but deduce that
the answer- is compassion and care for all of us.
When we have more people who we have nursed into a state of education and open
eyes- we will have- consistently- people who care about doing their part in
society properly, fairly, by the rules we have agreed upon.
We are very well made as individuals. We can walk down the street and say
hello to a stranger. But as groups of societies, we do terrible things to each
other. It’s as if the individual has grown up into mature adulthood, but the
group has never grown beyond the mentality of a child. A careless, selfish,
angry child that sometimes throws a tantrum.
Having educated people saturate our societies will enable the systems we have
to function as they were intended- instead of the twisted things we have
abused them to do.
We can solve all of the problems of the world, everything all of us care
about.
I would like to end there, because it sounds uplifting and poetic. But I will
be more concrete. If we made education the priority- and I mean priority as in
I don’t care if there’s not enough money to cure cancer or maintain a
military- if we did that- it would take one thousand years to fix all of the
problems in the world. I know people want their problems fixed now, or within
their generation. But people have been wanting that forever- and they have
never gotten it really fixed. We are still dealing with the same problems over and over.
It’s like whack-a-mole. If it’s class inequality, you hit it over the head and
it just pops up in another place, another time, another language. But it’s
really the same beast. So we never really solve the issue we care about.
If it’s prejudice, genocide- look at it- it just happens again, another time,
another place, another language, but really; it’s the exact same thing with
another name and other faces.
It will take a thousand years. It would mean sacrificing our wants and our
selfish desires- that someday- what we want will be had by us all- for every
one of us.
We don’t need cancer treatments, nuclear bombs, rolls-royces, prada. We
evolved out in the wild without any of these things for many tens of thousands
of years and we did fine. We did more than fine. We did so well that there are
six billion of us and rising. We do not need these things. We need to know, we
need to put the majority of our resources to teaching and learning about who
we are right now and what we want to be.
The rest will take care of itself. By people who have the best interests of
their fellow person at heart. The doctor, the soldier, the police officer, the
taxi driver and the person walking down the street across from you will all do
the right thing. Because they will know what the right thing is, and what it’s
worth to do it- because when they look at you from the other side with their
own two eyes, they know that you are them, and they are you.
