You can help make the world and your community better places

"Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow--it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it."
- Shakti Gawain, author of the New Age classic Creative Visualization

First off, let's establish whether or not evil and ignorance may be equated. I maintain that, in fact, they are one and the same thing.

Wherever you find something you would call evil, you will certainly find ignorance behind it. The ignorance may be on the part(s) of the perpetrator(s) or the victim(s).

How could this be?, you may ask.

The vast majority of people in any community are good, honest and hard working folks. Yes, sometimes they cross the line of honesty, but they are well within the general bounds of "good citizenship." That leaves a few who cause most (or all) of our social problems and many of our personal problems.

Rather than asking why these people cause their neighbours and families so many problems, we should ask why the majority do not. The answer is that the majority have learned the lessons associated with what we think of as good citizenship, or good friendship, or good neighbourship, or good relationship, but the minority have not.

Why not, for heaven's sake? The lessons needed to set these as ground rules for their lives were not firmly established within their first few years.

Who we are as adults is almost always set as if in stone by the time we reach age ten years, usually by age five. Any lesson that is not an integral part of a person's life by age ten may not ever become part of it. If we are not honest people by age ten, for example, it's unlikely we will ever be honest people.

If that is the case, then the obligation is on us to ensure that these lessons are taught to every child.

How do we do that? For Children age five on, we can have primary school teachers ensure that every child receives the same lessons.

Before age five, we must have courses in parenting offered to all new parents, preferably paid for by the government.

Why the government? These government will save huge amounts of tax money if they do not have to build more prisons, courts and hosptials and hire more police, prison guards and psychologists to deal with the broken people who "slipped through the cracks" of our present education systems.

Oops! Are our present education systems not foolproof and secure? Not by a long shot. That is what 'Turning It Around' was written to address.

The prisons of any country are filled with social misfits and mental hospitals and psychologists' offices filled with emotionally underdeveloped or maldeveloped people who could not cope with the rigors of their lives.

Yet no one bears the responsibility for the social and emotional development of children. We don't teach that to parents, so we have no cause to impose penalties on them for not teaching to the needs of their children.

We must shine the light on the needs of children and teach what they need. Our problems will not go away by leaving them in the shadows. They just get worse.

Complaining about how bad conditions are in our communities or families does no good. We need to spread the word about how our problems can be solved.

The solutions are available, full blown and cheap to implement, in Turning it Around.

Let's tell others that they can join us easily by reading the book and joining our group. There is no fee to join, no great commitment to make. We simply need lots of people to stand together and ask our governments to do what is needed to make all of our lives better.

If we do nothing, life conditions will only get worse.

Please ask your friends to join us.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/turningitaround

Bill Allin
'Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to make a difference by bringing peace to each community and each life with them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl