“Senate Unanimously Passes Resolution Declaring the press Is Not the Enemy of the People”
It would be nice if Congress would take more stands like this, but I think this action is superficial and all too politically safe.
I’m getting to the point where I think the whole system has become pathological (and Democrats are equally responsible for what’s happening). And, by the “whole system,” I really mean multiple systems (political, economic, educational, social, etc.). And, electing new people isn’t going to fix it. There might be a temporary shift, but we are collapsing (along with most other societies).
We (almost all people) have been “trained” to think in linear ways, where cause and effect are simplistic and blame is easy to assign. But, living systems are complex (they don’t operate according to simplistic linear rules and processes). Thinking that blames Trump or even the Republicans for our ills is way too simplistic. The current situation has arisen and continues due to a multiplicity of interacting systems. Capitalism and the rise of neoliberalism are big contributing factors. The systemic dumbing down of children through public schooling since the mid/late 1800’s is another factor, along with the mechanistic approaches to education that have prevented the learning of flexible, creative, and critical thinking. And, we can see how the social system has been created to respond to fear and anger, while maintaining an animal realm nose-to-the-ground existence. We can go on talking about how all of these systems interact and reinforce one another, but it’s too much to cover here.
The big characteristic of complex systems is that they are self-maintaining. At this point, the cluster of interacting systems has “learned” to maintain itself in generally the way we are seeing them manifest. Let’s say we elect a great Democratic president and Congress, we may notice a shift in certain characteristics, but the underlying patterns of money, power, and control will remain, just as they have for many decades. And, then as global warming continues to increase exponentially, the population continues to grow beyond the limits of resources that can maintain the population, and people (including millions of North Americans) are driven from their homes from these previously mentioned conditions, the deeply embedded patterns of reacting with fear and aggression comes storming back into the social-political-educational-economic-etc. contexts, and we get politicians who will be even worse than the ones we have now. And then, I suspect everything starts to collapse… and this is probably within the next decade or two.
It seems to me that the only things we can do to prevent a total collapse involve:
- not creating divisions between people, but getting everyone to begin caring for and supporting one another and working together;
- changing the way we think by moving from the linear and simplistic cause and effect ways of thinking to complex systems thinking; and
- not depending on politicians and governments to “solve” the problems, but working with others in the liminal spaces between institutions to explore ways of dealing with the big issues we’re facing.