Dr. Lane’s Thoughts XXXV

Dr. Lane’s Thoughts XXXV

1) The world of today in the US is politics not so much based on the
personal as a worldview but based on the personal exclusively.  Young
people do not have the concerns or issues that their parents have so their
politics and needs reflect only what they know to be true.

Basically, every person reading this lives their life through the
following statement:

“You think ________ is a problem?  That is not a
problem!  Now, what I am facing is a problem.  __________ – that is
an important issue!”

The two blanks can be filled in with any of the following words
but this list is not conclusive; just examples of what problems that people
face that fill their every thought and they are absolutely certain is the
main problem in their life: racism, sexism, rape, cancer, ageism, not
getting into the ‘right’ school, failing out of their major, the ‘wrong
clothes’, drug addiction,  losing a job, their body or face, their skin
color, a robbery, anger at their parents, the loss of someone in their life
through death or a breakup, homelessness, a medical bill, inability to get a
job or get a job with a better salary, and so on.

You just read that list and saw some of those items as trivial and
some as horrible, or you identified with some of them as issues in your life or
you have been through some of them and got past them.  In other words, you
saw some as easily solvable and others as demanding a collective attention
which could only be solved through many people seeing the problem as an
important issue that ‘all of us’ should seek a solution to.  In other
words, a political solution.

What you did not read was that in every person’s life these are
the problems that strain their knowledge and ability.  These are the
problems that cause them to reach out to others and drain everyone’s patience
and capabilities.

This list was not filled with young person’s issues or one racial
or ethnic group’s issues – simply these are issues that could affect any of us
at any time in our lives.  More essentially, these are also issues that
any person could dismiss as unimportant at any time in their lives because they
do not impact on themselves or anyone they know [I will not indulge the idea of
‘as far as they know’ since hidden issues cannot be faced by people if they are
out of their venue].

The problems we face impact on the politics we follow.  I
live in NJ where you do not have to drive too far to find areas which quickly
go from much less populated to rural and farmland.  What you immediately
see when you are in rural areas are small booths and shacks devoted to TRUMP
memorabilia: the sale of items devoted to a bad former president who claimed to
trumpet the needs of the common man while in office but actually spent the
years enriching himself like a cheap autocrat out of any tiny nation (you can
pick from a list of dozens but Haiti, Panama, many former soviet republics, and
half of Africa come to mind). 

In those communities the Trump shacks are not out of place and do
not fear being vandalized.  Anyone would tell you that an OBAMA shack in
those same places wouldn’t last 5 hours.  It is obvious that these Trump
shacks exist in mostly white areas where the appeal of a white leader (of any
kind) will always be considered more reasonable than a brown leader (of any
kind).  For most of these white people, they do not know any brown people
who aren’t celebrities on TV or the radio or, conversely, names mentioned on
the news as victims or perpetrators of crimes.  For them, their problems
are ‘white people problems’ and see the problems facing the US are the problems
that face their community – which does not include brown people (or Jews,
immigrants, or any other group that does not share their beliefs).

We can write the same kind of paragraph about inner-city Blacks
and their problems.  They may not have a shack selling OBAMA memorabilia
but they do have leaders that lay the blame for the problems of the US on a
history of Black enslavement, redlining, diminished opportunities for Black
youth, crime and drugs. You can call these ‘Black people problems’.

My next group of people to look at for illustrative purposes are
rich people.  It doesn’t matter what we mean by ‘rich’ so much as to say
people who do not have financial constraints on their choices in life and are
not burdened by money issues.  These people have found themselves in a
life separate from concerns about their skin color, their neighborhood, being
able to pay a rent or mortgage, being able to pay a bill, or even who is in
office representing their interests.

For many of these people, getting their kids into the right
schools to meet the right people, get the right grades, and get into the right
career is tantamount in their lives and everything else cannot be as
important.  These people do not look into a mirror and see an issue that
needs to be dealt with or look around their neighborhood and see a problem that
needs to be resolved.

What rich people do see as problems besides getting their children
on the right path is the continuing creep of ‘the underclass’ to invade their
sacred spaces in employment, school selection, opportunities, and resources
which they feel they are entitled to ‘because they earned it’ but also because
they ‘are willing to pay for it’.

Lastly, young people do not think that anti-Semitism or racism or
Jim Crow laws are as much of a problem today but they see  low
wages, lack of opportunities for the college-educated, high rents, crushing
school debt, aging parents, and so on are the principal drivers of their crises
in the US.

So we have some groups: Rural White, Urban Black, ‘Entitled Rich’,
and young people and they all have ‘problems’ that do not translate to problems
for the other groups (we must concede that a person may be a member of more
than one of these groups).  If anything, each group feels comfortable
stating with confidence that they could ‘solve’ the other groups’ problems.

In this way I have tried to illustrate politics in the US. 
Donald Trump did not even try to solve the problems of poor White people while
enriching himself – he only gave them the impression that he was the guy most
likely to understand their problems based solely on his skin color.  Trump
was more likely to look at issues that would assist rich people but they, in
turn, only saw him for what he could do for them (but not as one of them due to
his vulgarities, which were innumerable).  Barack Obama had the skin color
of a group in the US but truly only stood with the ones he most identified with
– the upwardly mobile, highly educated, erudite, ambitious, and well-read Black
people.  He did not have patience for people who did not try to succeed.

While closer to the source than her husband, Michelle Obama (who
grew up in Chicago) was also a product of a strong family who saw themselves a
separate from the greater population of Black Chicago.

Your politics are based on what you consider to be your daily
priorities, real or customary.  Every groupthink thrives on finding problems that impacts on them exclusively and having a villain who is the source
of those problems or standing in the way of the resolution of the
problem.  They are also convinced that if something changed to help
them, exclusively, that all the other problems that the other groups face would
fall into place and the ‘logjam’ of problems and issues facing all other groups
would be cleared (e.g. the US would be a better place to live for all of us).

But would solving the problems for one group – I mean really go to
task to fix their problems uniquely – solve the problems for all?  For too
long the US thought that working on the problems of White men without regard to
any other group was the panacea for everyone in the US.  

Nope, that did not work too well.  

[The resentment percolating within all non-represented groups soon
led to the necessity of constitutional change (Civil Rights Act, Women’s Right
to Vote, and so on).  The solutions are for one group without regard to all others are
not solutions at all.]

2) I want to make something clear about why I think immigrants are
great for this country.  Simply, if your name is not “Proud Feather
Lightfoot” you are an immigrant, legal or otherwise.  Do you think that you are contributing to the greatness of this country?  Most recent immigrants are contributing!

The real reason that immigrants are great is that, according to statistics, immigrants follow a simple pattern universally: they go to work in some industry, after two years they quit to start their own company or business (sometimes in the same industry and sometimes in other industries), then they employ other people to work for them.

Read that last paragraph again: an immigrant who comes to this country in 2-3 years opens up a job opportunity for another person while simultaneously creating a job for another person (who usually is someone from their country). 

Just to be clear – the US owes all of its greatness to its immigration of people from other countries.  Immigrants use our encouraging rules for business initiation and government programs to build, innovate, invent, and create to make us the leaders in every financial and business aspect.

3) The changes in the US in regards to laws about marijuana are a great step in making this country more productive.  Less young people going to prison (and many less people in prison), more tax revenue from the sale of legal products, a different form of relaxation (unlike alcohol, marijuana does not lead to aggressive behavior), and the removal of the illicit side of marijuana which led into the criminally inclined parts of our society.

When a drug is an intoxicant and not a stimulant the dangers to society are minimal.  We have already seen what happens when a readily available drug (alcohol) becomes illegal – it only feeds a criminal underworld with a money source that it should not have available.