Responsibility For All

Thank you all for your outpouring of support as well as kind and thoughtful comments about my daughter’s horrible experience with a sexual assault.  When reading your comments or receiving emails about the issues of the day I am constantly encouraged by your deep, reflective thinking focused only on making our world a better place.  The overwhelming message is that we are not alone.  There are millions of us that are asking the question, “Is this the best we can do?  Is this the best society we can create?”  The first step in moving forward always begins with questioning where we are.

Well my daughter went to court a few days ago to testify at a pretrial hearing against her attacker.  She told me it was the second worst experience of her life.  She had to relive and recount every detail of the assault.  She had to look square in the eye at Mr. Pin-Cushion face who tried to force himself on her.  She had to endure the hissing and insults from his troubled girlfriend who held his baby.  Another young woman also testified that this same disturbed man had lewdly chased her in the same parking lot.  Now it goes to a plea bargain conference. (He has a prior conviction.)  One strong impression my daughter had of the courtroom that day was the smothering presence of dark energy.  I know first hand what she means.

Two and a half decades ago I spent two years of Sundays and Thursday nights visiting and teaching inmates at a maximum security prison.  I was a volunteer for my church who was trying to bring hope to the hopeless.  The first inmate I personally met was Tex Watson, the main killer in Charles Manson’s band of murderers.  It was literally chilling.  Every time I went inside the prison and had those iron bars close behind me I felt a cold dark energy.  Inside several of the people I counseled were sex offenders.  Child molesters.  They were always the best educated, most articulate and most pleasant inmates.  Many had been sentenced to long stretches because they were repeat offenders.  I also taught and counseled drug dealers, a mass murderer and scores of chronic criminals.  When some of the more mild criminals were released it always hit me in two ways.  I was glad to see hope in a man’s eyes, but my practical sense told me how unprepared they were to succeed at every day life in a free society.  I nearly always assumed they would be back.

Today America has more people imprisoned than any country in history.  We have 2.5 million in iron bar hotels, more than all of Europe combined.  Most of these criminals are under-educated with few resources and a poor social support system.  We have another nearly 20 million people reporting to probation officers.  All of this is an expensive waste.  A waste of money and a waste of humanity.  Nearly every person I worked with in prison never learned self-control.  Never learned how to set goals and achieve them.  Never learned personal responsibility.  Some were truly nuts.  All were without self-respect.  Most without real hope.  Nearly everyone I met in prison needed to be locked up because they simply never learned how to function as a responsible human being.  But is this the best we can do?  As our population grows, our families disintegrate, our schools fail.  Is our answer only to build more warehouses for humans?

Maybe the biggest problem we have with prisons is how we currently view them.  Little productivity happens there.  They’re very expensive human storage units with Lord of the Flies cultures.  We actually have examples of different approaches.  We already know that there are subgroups of prisoners who will respond to training, mentoring, education and responsibility.  We know that hard-core felons that are released on probation to places like Delancey House in San Francisco can learn economically valued skills, stay off drugs and build productive lives.  Delancey runs a tight ship.  There are serious consequences for the slightest slip-up.  Everyone is expected to help everyone else in line.  It’s a culture of mutual responsibility.  In other prisons small groups are graduating from high school and even college.  Standards are high.  Bad behaviors get you expelled back to the weight room.  But some respond.  Of course there are many in prison who refuse to face responsibility.  They are committed to being bullies or victims; nevertheless, they should be expected to do productive work.  And for those that earn it, it should be work that contributes to a better world.  Without opportunity to learn, grow, and work, life is hopeless.  Without dignity.  And having millions of people living without learning self-discipline is costing us far more than requiring them to be productive.

Of course there will always be criminals who refuse responsibility.  There are many who cannot live in a free society. But those in prison should be expected to be more than they have become.  As long as we aspire to be a noble society, shouldn’t we explore ways to give the willing a way to contribute no matter where they are?  To require people to be responsible is to give them the gift of personal dignity.

To visit American Dream Project’s homepage, click here.

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Why Do We Suffer? Part 2

Yesterday I left off with…

This leads me to a bunch of interesting questions.

There are two major causes of suffering: avoidable and unavoidable. Avoidable suffering is human caused. Murder, theft, torture, selfishness, all the deep human flaws. If we asked God how come we have so much human cruelty he might answer, “Look in the mirror. It’s all on you. I gave you a mind and will to choose your response to any situation, and just look at you. After all, I taught you. The best you can do is assault a young woman. It breaks my heart.” There is no excuse for human-caused suffering. We choose to do it to each other. To willfully cause another to suffer is a monstrous human choice. We’re not God’s puppets. We own the society we’ve created.

Unavoidable suffering occurs as the result of the natural world and our own biology. There are earthquakes, floods and fires, and cancer and fatal accidents. Stuff happens. But what if life doesn’t matter in the way we think it does? What if the length of our life doesn’t matter at all, and what if unavoidable suffering happens to some to give the rest of us a chance to be compassionate? Compassionate service, especially to strangers, is one of the most noble of human acts. So the world and our bodies are frail so we can become agents of kindness and mercy to each other. Ridiculous? I wonder.

Of course I don’t know why the world is a dangerous and sometimes evil and unjust place. I do know that if we all got what we deserved, we would be “trained” like Sea World dolphins to be good because there’s a reward for it. If we got everything we prayed for, we all would be praying. If the only reason we chose to act nobly were a practical payoff, we’d have no authentic nobility. And yet, maybe that’s the real purpose of life. To act from our highest self when there is no payoff because it is pure oxygen for our deepest, enduring identity: to love and learn, give and grow—surely those are what give our life meaning.

Everyone must come to his or her own conclusion about life’s hard questions. For me there are things that over the years have become self-evident. First, life has genuine meaning. (To conclude that life is meaningless because we can’t figure it out may be the ultimate act of egotism.) Second, that love is real. (It is more than emotion or brain chemicals or DNA.) Third, our greatest growth as human beings comes through our chosen reactions to our own suffering and the suffering of others. Fourth, what’s really important is not what we think it is. (It’s not power, recognition, stuff, or the length of our lives.) Fifth, our human form is temporary. Our consciousness is not. (So be careful to choose your thoughts, feelings, and motives.) Sixth, perhaps our biggest fear is not that life doesn’t matter, but rather, that it does and that we are responsible.

I don’t expect you to agree with everything I have come to believe. I just appreciate you taking the time to listen.

Will Marre
American Dream Project

9 comments.

Why Do We Suffer? Part 1

It’s been a rough few days. When I returned home from teaching a class on Corporate Social Responsibility I had a message waiting from my 24 year-old daughter. When I called her she told me that she had been sitting in her car reading in the busy parking lot of a major mall waiting to start work. Suddenly her door was opened and this fierce young man grabbed her hair and pulled her head toward his unzipped pants. She somehow twisted around and pumped her left leg into his stomach. Then like a powerful piston she re-cocked her leg and kicked it with all her power into his lower chest. He gasped and fell back against the car parked next to her. She started screaming the moment he grabbed her hair, but no one in the busy parking garage came to help. As her assailant ran off she called 911. The police arrested him the next day as he lurked in the same mall. My daughter is a sweetheart doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. She didn’t deserve this. She’s also resilient. She’s okay.

So yesterday I read an editorial by author Michael Novak on his ideas about why a good God would allow so much human suffering. This one question is the core “disconnect” for most people with the Divine. The idea is if God is all-powerful and all loving this world makes no sense. The choice our minds and many agnostic writers give us is that either God is mean or disinterested, in which case we don’t want to know him let alone live with him in an afterlife. OR God just doesn’t exist and spiritual belief is a delusion. But are these our only choices?

Last night I finished a book titled The Scalpel and the Soul by Dr. Allan J. Hamilton. It’s the memoir of a Harvard trained brain surgeon documenting the experiences he’s had that led him to conclude that humans are primarily spiritual beings rather than biological ones. His most unusual chapter documents the case of a woman whose blood flow to her brain was cut off in order to repair an artery. In this delicate operation the patient was clinically dead. No brain waves for 20 minutes. When she was revived she had a clear recollection of the surgeons and nurses and their conversations while she was brain dead. All of this was captured real-time on video, so it’s not just a story. What happened was simply biologically impossible if we believe our brain is what creates consciousness. So, are we more than our biology?…Indeed.

As someone who’s had a heavy dose of years of prolonged suffering I have thought (and read) a lot about this problem of evil and misfortune. And here’s my current thinking. First of all, projecting my motives and worldview on all-powerful God is pretty weak. It’s what psychologists call “projection.” It means to judge another’s behavior by what our motives might be if we did whatever they are doing. This is painfully immature. Without direct discussion and deep insight we can’t know the motives of another person, let alone God. So to accuse him of being mean or even thoughtless because bad things happen to good people is, at a minimum, irrationally presumptuous. We’re just feebly guessing. Concluding that God can’t exist because a good God wouldn’t allow evil is a lot like a 3 year-old concluding that his mother hates him because he can’t eat candy whenever he wants. The 3 year-old doesn’t view the world in the same way his mother does, and one thing we can be sure of is that if God does exist we don’t see reality, purpose, time or suffering in the same way he does. So my conclusion is, I don’t know what God is thinking, but I am pretty sure it is wiser than what I would be thinking if I were in charge of the universe.

This leads me to a bunch of interesting questions…

Check back tomorrow for the interesting questions, and the six conclusions to life’s hard questions that have become self-evident over the years.

To visit American Dream Project’s homepage, click here.

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Crisis Creates Opportunity

The 4th of July weekend was amazing. The surf and weather were virtually perfect in San Diego. My brother-in-law, wife, six children, and a couple arriving on a Harley came and went over four days. It was a circus. It made me grateful that my time being daily responsible for young children is long over. The energy requirements are relentless. Mostly we laughed. It helps that my brother-in-law is as mature as a 14-year-old. He has a heart of gold and is a heat-seeking missile locked on fun. Mr. Harley man is from Texas. He recently finished a country CD titled It’s Rough Being Me. He has a voice like warm honey and tells stories like only a motorcycle riding Texan can.

But in times like these our conversation on the porch eventually turned to the price of gas, oil drilling and the economy. Every one of us has our own window on reality. Bits and pieces of things we’ve read or heard woven into our theory of how life should work. It turns out that Mr. Texas works from a pick-up truck, building oil-pipe lines. Yes, his job is secure and his pay is rising. Interestingly, my brother-in-law, Captain Fun, is also in the oil business. Cooking oil turned into Bio-Diesel that is. For 20 years he’s made and sold chemicals used in the restaurant business. It’s a small family business, only a few employees and teenage sons who work in the evening. As gas prices went crazy, he started collecting used cooking oil, refining it in his tilt-up warehouse and using it to run his trucks. Soon his neighborhood small business owners were asking him to brew up some french-fry juice for their trucks. Captain Fun named his new venture Pirate Oil. He’s expanding as fast as he can pour his profits back into more equipment. Amazing.

When the circus left town I reflected on two things. First, it’s true. Crisis is opportunity. Life-as-usual is going through some fundamental economic changes. And we can all shake our fists at the greed and stupidity that has brought us our rising tide of economic swamp water. But a reading of human history is largely the recounting of how human greed and stupidity causes needless suffering. If we are waiting for a messianic politician or a new technology to bail us out of our personal struggles with what decades of poor leadership has created, we will wait forever. Second, human imgenuity is an act of will. We can choose decisively to do something to better our lives, bless others and use this train wreck of our economy to stimulate us to a better life.

My brother-in-law, Pirate Oil—Captain Fun—Circus Ring Master, only has a high school diploma. But he has expert knowledge. He’s spent 20 years becoming an expert at safely mixing chemicals and selling them to small business people. He is also unafraid to try new things. But that’s about it. He has no stash of cash (six kids will do that to you), no safety net. What he does have is what we all need to survive in our new rock ‘n roll world—expert knowledge, developed skills, and the courage to act.

He is a living example of something I constantly teach younger audiences. That the world honors experts. What do you know or what are you willing to deeply learn that can make your ability uniquely valuable? How can you use that today to propel you through this swirling tornado of change? Make your expert ability of value to others and you will always carry your economic security with you. And don’t delay. Waiting for the world to change for the better is never a good personal strategy. After all, it’s better to burn the french-fry oil as fuel than it is to eat the french-fries.

Imagine that.

To visit American Dream Project’s homepage, click here.

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The 4th American Revolution

Today we seem almost numb to the steady stream of leadership failures, scandals, and lies. National polls tell us we are losing faith in our primary institutions of government, education, religion, and business to provide leadership. According to social research from DYG, over 85% of the American Public feel uncertain about our future quality of life, of having a robust, growing economy, adequate personal or national security, or maintaining the quality of our environment.

The time of change is indeed upon us. It seems that every 70 years or so, roughly the time of an average person’s life, our system needs to face a moment of truth, a revolution, a re-thinking about what matters most. This has already happened three times in American history. In each case, the revolution was first led by a thoughtful and passionate group of extraordinary citizens.

The first American Revolution started as a result of England’s corrupt “special interests” turning Americans into second-class citizens. The greed of King George and his cronies made taxes, tariffs, and the treatment of colonists unbearable. Men of great courage and intellect decided it was time to stand for something. American Revolutionaries were driven to create a world that was fairer and filled with more opportunity, more dignity, and more compassion. A world where people’s character was more important than their class. Where merit meant more than pedigree.

The second American Revolution extended the ideals of the Declaration to all Americans. It took a Civil War. The Great Depression ignited the third American Revolution creating public policy to promote honesty in our financial markets and access to opportunity that spawned the greatest middle-class in world history.

Today, we are in a full-blown historical crisis. All of us. If we were a basketball team, we’d be starting the fourth quarter losing by 30 points. And yes, I have great hope that we can still pull out a victory. But we must first be realistic. Our game plan is not working. In fact, it’s a disaster. What we are witnessing is a fundamental change in the viability of our economy. Still, politicians, business leaders, and economic experts insist that our current bleeding of foreclosures, tight credit, raging inflation and our disappearing dollar is only a flesh wound. But it’s not. And most of us have a knot in our stomach because we sense something big and bad may be happening. And well we should. For 50 years we’ve frittered away our greatest achievements and most wonderful advantages. Imagine this. In the 1960’s we rebuilt our schools and rose up a generation of engineers and scientists that first got us to the moon and then gave us the computer age. Then we forgot education was a priority. So today 30% of Americans in high school won’t graduate. We have so few engineers we have to rent them b y the planeload. Among developed nations we’ve gone from first to worst in K-12 education in 30 years.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and America proved to the world that our system was the winner. We won the World War. Unthinkable. Amazing. So today, Russia is reasserting its ominous power financed by its massive oil and gas reserves. The western world is held hostage by over-rich oil lords, mad terrorists and raging ambitions of nobody-is-going-to-tell-me-what-to-do communist China. So much for America’s Golden Age of world peace. Meanwhile failed leadership has bankrupted us. We have $13 trillion economy with over $10 trillion of that coming from our own consumption. The only thing we make that the world wants is our weapon systems and big budget action movies. Basically our biggest export is violence.

In five years the percent of our national debt owed to foreign interests has more than doubled from 20% to over 50%. More than ever foreign governments influence our economic policy. We are so financially overdrawn our infrastructure is collapsing. We’ve spent over $700 billion on a war that will not end while our road, bridges, airports, dams, sewer systems and water supplies decay form decades of neglect. But the biggest failure of leadership is promoting a consumer economy driven by easy money and universal debt. The American consumer has no more assets to borrow against and doesn’t earn enough to pay off what’s owed.

All that must change. For decades they’ve promoted the false idea that rising wages is the core cause of inflation. Now we see inflation is primarily caused by economic and social policy that jacks up housing bubbles, medical costs, food prices, and gasoline. I could go on but that’s not really the point. The real point is, are going to do something about it?

It’s time for a new model of leadership. A model that embraces our joint responsibility for the general welfare of all citizens. This leadership is not yet clearly offered in substance by either presidential candidate. We don’t need refried Democratic liberalism because government bureaucracy is a poor and wasteful provider of actual services. We also cannot endure Republican policies that only concentrates more wealth and power that makes corruption inevitable. What’s needed is a revolutionary view of leadership that is consistent with our nation’s first aspirations. It seeks to neither provide handouts and freebies to the poor or subsidies and tax breaks and favor for the rich. What we need are government and business leaders that have the moral vision to pursue policies that elevate and radically improve education for all from preschool through the many phases of adult life. We need to re-enthrone honest competition and end corporate welfare. We must criminalize what has become brazen, if-legal, corruption of our national government by special interests.

Today our government’s own accounting office estimates one third of our $3 trillion national budget is wasted. We don’t need higher taxes. We need smarter spending. We need ethics and honesty. We all know this. Now we must demand it. All we are asking is for a government of leaders seeking the public interest instead of their self-interest. And what’s in the public interest is universal quality education and an uncorrupt playing field. Americans have the ingenuity to create a new future. We just need a government who will provide the conditions for our talent to bloom. This is called Civic Social Responsibility. It’s nothing new. It’s what our country was founded on. Government by the people, for the people.

YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN OUR ATTEMPT TO GIVE AMERICANS A VOICE:
AMERICA’S NEW AGENDA

To visit American Dream Project’s homepage, click here.

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