Serious About Climate Change? Do This!

If it matters, it'll be a special part of the program. So if we, as a nation, are serious about changing our culture to combat the challenges of climate change, we'll create an infrastructure that permeates our programs from civic planning to regulative policy to education.

What better way to get students thinking about it than by having a very visible Student Climate Convention at all levels of school: Middle, High, College.  Whether aligned with city/county/State, or by State and National representative districts, gathering students for conventions at all levels of government organization would be a great way to involve a significant portion of our next generation.

Every homeroom is represented in a school-wide club who's purpose is to increase awareness of how our lives are connected to both the current environment at so many levels, and what we do on a local scale can contribute to helping and hurting.  [Colleges could do it by major.] The schools would elect a representative team from their school to attend the county convention.  That convention could be a 2-way communication from the scientific/academic, industrial, and government entities pushing the latest findings and initiatives, The schools would present the initiatives at their schools, and elect a team to represent them at the state level.  The state convention would have county representation and do the same thing at that level.  Finally, the states would send an elected team to the national convention.  It could garner the same sort of media interest as the states came together to gather opinions and trends, pick some best practices, collect the information and publish the results and findings in an Annual Youth Climate Change State of the Union.

That's just an initial idea -- there are lots of ways to cascade from school to national levels, and there are lots of different formats to build it.  If we can do March Madness with something as inconsequential as collegiate basketball and the college bowls with football, we can certainly do something similar with human relations.  Wait, I mean climate change.  Add a competitive component?  A prize component?  Ask some producers how they could make this meaningful.  Having educators who are sponsoring student groups would be like the coaches for sports teams.  Building capacity within each school to bring that intimate connection between our individual lives and the whole earth to all of our areas of endeavor is not such a stretch.  We can do this.

Where Wealth Redistribution Lies

You hear the negative tone from the Right repudiating wealth distribution as a socialist corruption of democracy and capitalism.

Here's the question: Are they stupid, blind, or obfuscating?

Let's go with reality instead of philosophy for a second.  The real story of wealth redistribution is the shift of wealth from the lower and middle class to the wealthy over the last 50 years.  When the rich control politics which influences government (which makes the rules about taxes and their distribution, fiscal policy, minimum wage, labor law, etc.), it's just what I'd expect.  They end up getting richer and more powerful on the backs, and from the pockets. of the rest of us.  Wage inequality and the wealth redistribution in this country is out of control (to use technical systems analysis jargon).  If it keeps up, it's a positive feedback loop that will continue to weaken America (against a hypothetical potential of what it could be) until the top-heavy wealth distribution leads to increasing desperation and it tumbles.  Trickle down just didn't really work, did it.

The smartest long-term action for the currently wealthy is to change course and increase the wages of the poor and lower middle class to help more of them reach financial stability because their collective confidence in their situation creates economic stability instead of slaves that will eventually check out (happening more and more when you look at the unemployed, no longer looking for work, which turns them into bigger burdens).

What are the odds, though, of the wealthy (who hold corporate purse strings) voluntarily shrinking the wage gap between the higher and lower wages within their control?  Keep margins the same, but switch the salary scale way to the left of what it is now.  Costco versus Walmart.  Starbucks versus McDonalds.

Suppression and Its Devastating and Inexorable Effects

When a human experiences a severe trauma while young, it will manifest itself in unpredictable ways, but it will.  PTSD is real and almost always negative, frequently severely debilitating.  There is no ignoring it.  We're still learning how to treat this disorder, but it seems addressing the root cause is critical, as well as managing the symptoms and destructive damaging behaviors.

A country or a people is the same way.  When it has undergone serious trauma, like Slavery and the Civil War which sought to end it, the healing is going to be a long-term endeavor, and not directly dealing with the deep wounds requires taking an unflinching look at the lacerations and inflammation is not enough, just as in a physical injury.  Risk of infection exists with the potential to deeply harm the nation.  I believe inadequate healing is what we are suffering from, and any denial will leave diseased tissue.  It requires a solution that, like a general antibiotic that travels throughout the whole organism, it heals the infection nation-wide.

Maybe someone wants to develop a cancer analogy that works.  But the unrest in and around the country are, in my view, a natural flare up from a function of our inability to truly look at who we are as a nation, what we've done to wrong ourselves, and do what it really takes to return to full "mental" health as a nation.

We are suffering because we have continued to impose suffering on sectors of our population, and the protests are a natural expression of pain.  We know it's there, and it's not going away until we, all of us, bring our full resources to bear.

Filner

No way.  The leader of a big city who is using his position to behave in a way that is universally understood to be reprehensible.  At least with Clinton, no one accused him of coercion to get sex.  It's bad enough when someone who is clearly bestowed a position of great power and trust acts in a juvenile manner, with lewd comments or sexual innuendo.  If you can't use the Mayor as a role model, who then?  But to use the position of authority for personal gain of any kind (including financial or sexual favors) needs to be intolerable.  Corruption is a blight capable of bringing down a government.  Everywhere possible, it needs to be met with unequivocal resolve: Not in my (community, city, state, country)!  No second chance for Filner.  He blew his big chance to be trusted.  It wasn't just a single or isolated incident. It's who he is.