Peace and Prosperity In Our Time

Although we won’t read about it in the mainstream media (which is hopelessly and pathologically addicted to bad news and dysfunction), the present time is one of unprecedented peace and prosperity in the world -- with virtually no major hostilities and violence occurring except in those disposed to imagining every slight as an excuse for retaliation. That’s not to say that there are no argumentative persons who thrive on conflict and ambition to give them their sense of being alive -- but luckily, they mostly work in the mainstream media or in politics, where they can easily be identified and isolated from the rest of the population.

Demagoguery isn’t what it used to be -- mainly because it’s been overdone by all the would-be petty despots, so that it is like so much junk (e)mail that merely gets knowingly filtered, deleted and disposed. The most creative minds are not intrigued by what more ingenious scams and cons they can devise, but really, can think of more useful things to do -- rather than just trying to fool everybody else to prove they are smarter than everybody else.

The major reason the mainstream media and politicians won’t point out this peace and prosperity is that they resisted such initiatives to eliminate these possibilities, dismissing them as foolish notions that violence and hostilities could ever be eliminated -- and all humankind could do, was to lament that such atrocities were the inevitable fate of societies.

So it’s good to see people turning their attention to all the wonderful and ingenious products now available to enhance their lives -- while those who don’t, continue to insist that the world and everything in it never changes, and hoard their money rather than exchange them for wonderful products of value and usefulness. These people prefer their misery and complaining -- rather than finding out the joy in the world created by those with the will and initiative to do so.

Of course one can complain that everybody else is still not doing everything one thinks they ought to be doing -- to make that person determined to be dissatisfied and displeased, happy. That is what the joyful conclusion of the year is about -- celebrating the excess and abundance that one accumulated over the year, and regaining that confidence that things might be permanently better -- as a long-term trend, and not just the insecurity of the moment.

Peace and prosperity are not accidents of our times but the whole meaning and purpose of human societies and enterprise -- so it should not be regarded as a random event of wishful-thinking. Good things happen because people make them happen, and not as the random events media reporters will insist are too good to be true and lasting.

Peace and prosperity is well deserved -- and well-earned, by those who act on those intentions, and not merely by those who wish bad things will not happen if they close their eyes and ears hard enough.

Good news is what we’ve worked so hard to achieve -- and deserve to hear about.

Where We Are Today

It should come as no surprise to learn that events do not take place in a vacuum, and is actually the result of the greater cultural context, than the will of individual ambitions and aspirations of a previous historical context. There is millions of years of momentum and evolution -- that makes improvement and greater order inevitable, despite some demagogues warnings that things were never so bad, and getting worse. That is not the reality but the opinions of a few -- who only know how to breed and generate discontent and dissatisfaction, as their only motivation, no matter how false and deceptive that might be.

They would have us believe that we have no mass transit system -- rather than we already have one of the best in the world -- even if most people choose not to use it. But that doesn’t mean that there is none; it is just not the much more expensive one that they think will cause everybody to use it -- forcing everybody to go where it is going, rather than wherever they want to truly go.

In some places, the places everybody goes, is to the same place -- while in other places in the world, the place everybody likes to go to, is different -- and that is the lure of such romantic locales as “Hawaii.” If everybody has to do the same thing, going to the same places, then that is not the romantic getaway (paradise), but the treadmill of crowded cities that only longs to get away.

You can’t turn one into the other -- but millions of lives and years, have made each uniquely what it is, which is not necessarily what only a few “experts” should now determine, is what it should be. The world has not changed that greatly, that now, only a self-designated few, should once again make these decisions for everybody else -- because presumably “they know better.” Such experts have been wrong before -- because that’s not how the fate and destiny of world evolution is determined -- by the deliberate and systematic suppression of all the other alternatives, and the financing and dedication only of their own vision of man's purpose for immortality, no matter how great and impressive one thinks the pyramids was worth the sacrifice of so many lives and resources to immortalize one person's vision of their place in the pantheon.

In all probability, everything that life now tells us, is that we are on the verge of a great divergence and expression of choices -- rather than the “One size fits all, no matter how badly," of contemporary popular culture and its handmaiden media. All the tools mankind has developed, has brought us to the point of the uniquely custom-designed optimal life for everyone -- which is much more than just the triviality of “doing one’s own thing,” just because one can.

Now the choices are very meaningful, and the ultimate expressions of fulfillment -- that nobody should decide for another, or should decide for every other. Yet that is still the mentality we see strutting out before us as government and “leadership” in Hawaii, that really awaits this transformation in consciousness and awareness -- that doesn’t begin in the legislature, but is the last to recognize the new realities.

Good representatives really know how to follow where society is heading -- and is not forcing it to conform to its own will, no matter what the tide of unlimited human choices will determine is the best for itself.

The people will lead, and its representatives should follow the lead of the people -- and not unilaterally dictate as the tyrants of the past.

Beyond the Petty Politics (Partisanship)

The original great idea for establishing government, was to create a body and forum for the discussion of the larger vision of life -- and not so that every special interest group could dominate and tyrannize any and every other. Those were the reasons, the founders of the new society of freedoms, dissolved the old tyranny -- in which one group had the right to subjugate every other, even if they claimed that as the divine will of God(s).

For about two hundred years, that idea held sway and largely seemed to work, until some decided they could appear to be the “will” of the people, by suppressing all the voices not in on the current conspiracy to seize exclusive power and control. Now that special interest, is not surprisingly, the government workers themselves -- who no longer see themselves as the servants, but have come to regard themselves as the new masters of the government that should exist to serve primarily themselves.

Such abuses come easily when there is a notion of “entitlement” -- to be in power and control as long as one lives, and it no longer matters how they got there in the first place. It is now just their right to continue for as long as they wish to -- at the top, without answering to any review. “Power is its own right,” they are fond to say -- until one day, for some known and unknown reasons, they themselves find themselves powerless and at the mercy of (capricious) others -- and then they realize the terror of abuse of power and betrayal of trust. So every generation tries to protect itself -- from the exploitation of others, by keeping those who might do so, as weak and disabled as possible, not realizing they may be dependent on such abilities themselves, and really should be empowering that generation rather than exploiting and subjugating the weak so that a self-designated few can remain in control.

Only in that manner, is it possible to empower themselves also -- beyond the expectations they have constrained for themselves. In petty politics, the objective is to make everyone less powerful than oneself -- which has no limit, to how petty it can become until finally, the only activity and work done, is to cancel out everybody else in society -- so they cannot get ahead. Nobody gets ahead in that scheme.

A winning strategy would be to see everyone win -- even more so than oneself, because those are the people one will eventually deal or trade with, and it doesn’t hurt if they can offer the gifts of their talents unrestrained and corrupted. This is the new age of government and society -- not to keep everyone else less empowered than those in power, so that they can remain on the top forever, but to envision a society in which people are allowed and encouraged to win -- rather than they can’t be allowed to win because "it would make everybody else look bad."

Then “looking bad” becomes outlawed rather than acknowledged as the bad it truly is -- which enables one to discriminate and discover the truly good and useful, and unfailingly move in that direction. But under current advice and policies, one is told, not to be able to make such distinctions and discriminations -- which are now only allowed, to the properly designated “authorities,” who will henceforth, decide what it is everyone should think is “correct” and true -- and they will pass laws to see that it is so exclusively for their benefit.

Bias is Bias (And Destroys Itself)

A lot of people and organizations think it is all right to be biased (unfair) -- as long as they are biased in the right way and causes, which every biased and hateful person will justify; there are no exceptions. So for the media people do proclaim that, “It’s OK for us to be biased because we’re biased liberally and Democratically,” is a self-indictment that they have no idea what fairness and credibility means, and they are as unreliable and despicable as any other individual propagating deception and manipulation as their “public service.”

The mainstream media has become almost entirely about self-promotion and self-aggrandizement in this way -- which might have worked in a previous time when there was no example of anything else, because all the other publications and sources were also that way. But once we have a few examples of people really doing things differently, that solidarity breaks down fairly quickly, and nobody wants to be the last defending the eroding status quo -- while the smarter ones have moved on.

Many people warned and pointed out the monolithic bias of the information sources of the media, schools and universities -- which tried to maintain their solidarity as long as possible -- with nobody admitting to any self-criticism and insight, that the refusal to acknowledge abuses, didn’t mean abuses were not perpetrated daily -- until most of the self-respecting, credible people had gone.

Anybody who hasn’t picked up a hardcopy edition of the local newspapers lately will be shocked to see that the traditional bedrock of those distributions are gone -- which are the classified ads, which somebody informed me, were now even free and still they are no takers.

Anybody who is familiar with financial markets, have been aware that for several years now, all the newspaper and traditional media stocks do, is go down, while new media stocks like Google and Baidu (China), fly up daily to shower great riches on their speculators. Obviously, these people know where the money (excitement) is.

That’s basically the story of money flows and interest in the world that stock markets represent. There are areas of interest, speculation and excitement -- and then there are the areas that people are abandoning, though nobody will make a loud and definitive proclamation of that fact. It’s like the buggy whip industry that once was in its heyday -- no matter how much the politicians would like to retain full employment in those dying industries. Even the workers want to move on and be liberated from their glorious jobs working the fields and mines -- as much as their unions would like to guarantee that they will have those jobs for the rest of their lives.

That is the same with every guarantee of a lifetime job. It’s really better for people to move on -- and that’s what the government machinery should enable and empower one to do, and not simply continue the old way of life for as long as one lives -- which ensures one’s deterioration into an agonizing death of irrelevancy and unresponsiveness to the new challenges of every present.