Our Own Shame
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
This would apply today to television and movies as well.
Instead of doing what we must to see that our countrymen avoid behaviours we consider shameful, we complain about the books, movies and television programs that show everyone who and what we really are.
We complain about what is wrong, but we don't change our system so that we teach what we believe is right and good.
Changing our education systems would be easy, literally as easy as the stroke of a pen. We have lots of good people in every community that live the kinds of lives we consider ideal in a moral sense. They are the source for new curriculum material for schools.
And it's cheap because teachers would not need new books, AV materials or computers to teach it. Teachers already know this stuff. They only need the authorization to teach it. All teachers would need is material provided in a curriculum guide.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to enact change in their education systems to address problems that run rampant in their communities and even in their homes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label guilt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guilt. Show all posts
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Monday, August 11, 2008
Behind The Curtains Of Bullies And Cheaters
Forgiveness is an inner correction that lightens the heart. It is for our peace of mind first. Being at peace, we will now have peace to give to others, and this is the most permanent and valuable gift we can possibly give.
- Gerald Jampolsky, American psychiatrist, founder of the International Center for Attitudinal Healing
Forgiveness is only necessary because we believe that others should treat us fairly and they have not, thus we try to hold their offences against them.
This belief in the need for fairness between people is built into us. For a long time it was said that "Life's not fair, get over it." A study completed recently (at the University of Toronto, as I recall) indicated that babies have a sense of fairness. Given a choice, the subject babies tended to turn to a person who had done something fairly and away from someone who had done something we might consider unfair, and that was a fairness judgment involving other babies, not themselves. A sense of fairness, it seems, came along with our genetic material when we were born.
That sense of fairness usually serves us well. Most people are fair with us as we are with them. That builds a kind of unspoken trust, even if it involves a shopkeeper we have just met, because we have had good experiences with other shopkeepers in the past. When someone betrays that trust, we treat it as an act of aggression, as if the person had thrown down the proverbial glove and challenged us to battle.
Those who do not act on their impulse to be aggressive in the face of unfair treatment may hold a grudge. "I'll never go back to that store and I will tell everyone I know for the rest of my life to never darken its door."
The thing about grudges, about acts of unfairness, about betrayals of trust, is that most of the time the offender doesn't know he has committed a violation of our expectations. Moreover, he usually wouldn't care if he did know. With rare exceptions, the offender remains guilt-free. The offended person is the one who gets hurt.
That hurt is totally self inflicted. The hurt usually causes more grief to the person who adopts it than the consequences of the original offence.
Most people believe that people who hurt themselves--for whatever reason--are not entirely sane. No matter how just the cause of the offended person, hurting themselves by holding a grudge or throwing a punch and landing in jail, or beginning a shouting match is considered anti-social.
Everyone accepts that people are not perfect. What we find difficult to accept is when the imperfections of others play themselves out on us through acts we perceive as unfair. It doesn't seem to matter how difficult the life of an offender has been before the offence, the offensive act itself gets the dander of the offended person up.
When the emotions surrounding such situations are laid bare, don't they seem kind of ridiculous?
That's where forgiveness comes in. In most cases, when we forgive we do a great favour for ourselves. Only when we allow ourselves that sense of peace can we spread it around to others.
As Gerald Jampolsky said, giving peace to others is the most valuable gift we can give anyone. But we must have that peace within us to share before we can give it to others.
Most people who treat us unfairly don't intend to hurt us. They just don't care. They have their own troubles and have no time for ours or our whining about them. How might we change their life by giving them forgiveness and peace?
Take this as a general rule: the most hurtful people are most in need of forgiveness and peace within themselves.
Which might give you greater satisfaction, venting your anger on someone who has offended you or giving them peace which could make their lives better for years to come? The former is faster, easier and more hurtful to ourselves.
I have had several occasions in my life to turn a bully into a friend. The first was in grade seven when I nearly strangled a bully who sat behind me in class, when he threatened to kill me at recess and he came at me with that objective in mind at the beginning of the break. I was happy that he didn't kill me and apparently he was pleased that I had let him live. We became friends for the rest of the school year. Other friendships have begun with people who began our relationship by cheating me in a business transaction.
As odd as this may sound, they needed the forgiveness, the peace I offered and the friendship overtures, likely because they lacked all of them in their personal lives. As oversimplified as it may sound, people who treat others unfairly, like bullies, need love and have neither the ready sources (such as from their mother) nor the skills to know how to make friends.
Now you're on notice. You know how to recognize people who need a friend. Someone of good character would accept that challenge.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that (among other things) explains the background of bullying and ways for children and adults to work their way around it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Gerald Jampolsky, American psychiatrist, founder of the International Center for Attitudinal Healing
Forgiveness is only necessary because we believe that others should treat us fairly and they have not, thus we try to hold their offences against them.
This belief in the need for fairness between people is built into us. For a long time it was said that "Life's not fair, get over it." A study completed recently (at the University of Toronto, as I recall) indicated that babies have a sense of fairness. Given a choice, the subject babies tended to turn to a person who had done something fairly and away from someone who had done something we might consider unfair, and that was a fairness judgment involving other babies, not themselves. A sense of fairness, it seems, came along with our genetic material when we were born.
That sense of fairness usually serves us well. Most people are fair with us as we are with them. That builds a kind of unspoken trust, even if it involves a shopkeeper we have just met, because we have had good experiences with other shopkeepers in the past. When someone betrays that trust, we treat it as an act of aggression, as if the person had thrown down the proverbial glove and challenged us to battle.
Those who do not act on their impulse to be aggressive in the face of unfair treatment may hold a grudge. "I'll never go back to that store and I will tell everyone I know for the rest of my life to never darken its door."
The thing about grudges, about acts of unfairness, about betrayals of trust, is that most of the time the offender doesn't know he has committed a violation of our expectations. Moreover, he usually wouldn't care if he did know. With rare exceptions, the offender remains guilt-free. The offended person is the one who gets hurt.
That hurt is totally self inflicted. The hurt usually causes more grief to the person who adopts it than the consequences of the original offence.
Most people believe that people who hurt themselves--for whatever reason--are not entirely sane. No matter how just the cause of the offended person, hurting themselves by holding a grudge or throwing a punch and landing in jail, or beginning a shouting match is considered anti-social.
Everyone accepts that people are not perfect. What we find difficult to accept is when the imperfections of others play themselves out on us through acts we perceive as unfair. It doesn't seem to matter how difficult the life of an offender has been before the offence, the offensive act itself gets the dander of the offended person up.
When the emotions surrounding such situations are laid bare, don't they seem kind of ridiculous?
That's where forgiveness comes in. In most cases, when we forgive we do a great favour for ourselves. Only when we allow ourselves that sense of peace can we spread it around to others.
As Gerald Jampolsky said, giving peace to others is the most valuable gift we can give anyone. But we must have that peace within us to share before we can give it to others.
Most people who treat us unfairly don't intend to hurt us. They just don't care. They have their own troubles and have no time for ours or our whining about them. How might we change their life by giving them forgiveness and peace?
Take this as a general rule: the most hurtful people are most in need of forgiveness and peace within themselves.
Which might give you greater satisfaction, venting your anger on someone who has offended you or giving them peace which could make their lives better for years to come? The former is faster, easier and more hurtful to ourselves.
I have had several occasions in my life to turn a bully into a friend. The first was in grade seven when I nearly strangled a bully who sat behind me in class, when he threatened to kill me at recess and he came at me with that objective in mind at the beginning of the break. I was happy that he didn't kill me and apparently he was pleased that I had let him live. We became friends for the rest of the school year. Other friendships have begun with people who began our relationship by cheating me in a business transaction.
As odd as this may sound, they needed the forgiveness, the peace I offered and the friendship overtures, likely because they lacked all of them in their personal lives. As oversimplified as it may sound, people who treat others unfairly, like bullies, need love and have neither the ready sources (such as from their mother) nor the skills to know how to make friends.
Now you're on notice. You know how to recognize people who need a friend. Someone of good character would accept that challenge.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that (among other things) explains the background of bullying and ways for children and adults to work their way around it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Blaming Is For Losers And Bigots
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to beunable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong. - G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
When I first read this quote, I stumbled over the word "bigotry." I didn't associate bigotry with being right or wrong, but with people hurting other people for unjust reasons.
As I reread the quote several times (always wise with Chesterton quotes), I tried to place the situation into context. In what situation could a person not be able to imagine that he had gone wrong?
The answer: when he has found someone else to blame.
In most branches of culture in the West, laying blame on someone else is one of the primary rules taught to children.
"My child didn't do anything wrong, it was the others who did it and blamed him." "My child didn't do anything wrong, it was the teacher who let the others get away with it and my kid got blamed." Then there's a whole litany of examples where father or mother hold the main responsibility for something going wrong, but they repeatedly blame someone else, usually a boss, co-worker, neighbour, family member or someone else they don't want to see succeed.
The "mother" and "father" parts of those blame sessions serve as role models for the children. What kids learn is what their parents do. This lessons is: when something goes wrong, always find someone else to blame.
That's not significantly different for blaming unemployment on immigrants who have come into a country and take jobs that the country's natives would not accept. Including when doctors, judges, architects and professors have to drive taxicabs or work construction jobs because they aren't allowed into the professions that secured their right to immigrate in the first place.
It's not significantly different from blaming people of one particular skin colour for doing what they felt absolutely necessary to do to survive when their underfunded education system didn't give them the skills, attitude and work habits they needed to enter the work force as equals with their peers who happened to be born with more or less skin pigment.
It's not significantly different from advocates of political correctness who take absurd positions on what might be insulting to "others" (whose opinions they never request) and force the majority to bend to their will by using language like a political or religious paintbrush. Or others of their peers who despise changes in language usage from what they were taught in school, as children, even though language constantly changes (a fact they seem not to know or accept).
Self-righteous people are bigots, no matter in what colour of robes they clothe themselves. Every religion has its share, people who want to tell others how to live their lives. People who condemn others for "sins" they may have invented themselves or adopted from other publicly acknowledged prejudicial organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan white supremacists of the past in the USA.
The very people who claim that sinners will go to hell when they die when they are condemned by God want to play God themselves and punish the sinners here and now. They want to punish sinners (or preferably have others punish them) who have not broken laws but who may live by moral codes that differ from their own. Despite what they supposedly believe about God punishing sinners when they die, the bigots want to see anyone who is clearly different punished, preferably before they die. Just to make sure that God doesn't overlook the sinners and let them pass into the same heaven the bigots plant to inhabit themselves.
If the sinners are wrong, these people believe, they should suffer here as well as later. For what are the sinners to blame? They're different. Bigots have no trouble trumping up reasons to condemn those they feel superior to.
To a bigot, fixing is not the focus, blaming is. To a bigot, teaching someone who is clearly at fault for something so that the same problem or error will not happen again is not as important as making someone suffer now for the fact it happened.
We each get to be blamers or teachers. Destroyers or fixers. Spies or mentors. Those between the extremes live relatively meaningless lives, lives that will result in them not being missed when they die.
Like it or not, the blamers, destroyers and spies receive more recognition when they die than the multitude in the middle between the extremes. Hitler blamed the Jews (for just about everything negative he could think of), for example, and look at how many millions of people believed him and wanted to make him emperor of the world. We remember Hitler today.
We also remember The Mahatma, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a man who singlehandedly brought the attention of the world to the atrocities and brutalities that the British were inflicting on their biggest colony, India, resulting in the country's eventual independence. Though many people died at the time of independence of India and Pakistan, no one blamed Gandhi who taught that peace was the only way to effectively change anything. The massive slaughter was based on religious prejudice--Muslims and Hindus blaming each other for their problems--not on what Gandhi achieved through peace.
Strangely enough, most of the good citizens of South Asia accepted that communal violence was wrong, they stopped blaming each other and decided that the only way for the future was to coexist peacefully. They learned, they changed and they live now in peace.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow their children without prejudice, by teaching them what is truly right and wrong.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
When I first read this quote, I stumbled over the word "bigotry." I didn't associate bigotry with being right or wrong, but with people hurting other people for unjust reasons.
As I reread the quote several times (always wise with Chesterton quotes), I tried to place the situation into context. In what situation could a person not be able to imagine that he had gone wrong?
The answer: when he has found someone else to blame.
In most branches of culture in the West, laying blame on someone else is one of the primary rules taught to children.
"My child didn't do anything wrong, it was the others who did it and blamed him." "My child didn't do anything wrong, it was the teacher who let the others get away with it and my kid got blamed." Then there's a whole litany of examples where father or mother hold the main responsibility for something going wrong, but they repeatedly blame someone else, usually a boss, co-worker, neighbour, family member or someone else they don't want to see succeed.
The "mother" and "father" parts of those blame sessions serve as role models for the children. What kids learn is what their parents do. This lessons is: when something goes wrong, always find someone else to blame.
That's not significantly different for blaming unemployment on immigrants who have come into a country and take jobs that the country's natives would not accept. Including when doctors, judges, architects and professors have to drive taxicabs or work construction jobs because they aren't allowed into the professions that secured their right to immigrate in the first place.
It's not significantly different from blaming people of one particular skin colour for doing what they felt absolutely necessary to do to survive when their underfunded education system didn't give them the skills, attitude and work habits they needed to enter the work force as equals with their peers who happened to be born with more or less skin pigment.
It's not significantly different from advocates of political correctness who take absurd positions on what might be insulting to "others" (whose opinions they never request) and force the majority to bend to their will by using language like a political or religious paintbrush. Or others of their peers who despise changes in language usage from what they were taught in school, as children, even though language constantly changes (a fact they seem not to know or accept).
Self-righteous people are bigots, no matter in what colour of robes they clothe themselves. Every religion has its share, people who want to tell others how to live their lives. People who condemn others for "sins" they may have invented themselves or adopted from other publicly acknowledged prejudicial organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan white supremacists of the past in the USA.
The very people who claim that sinners will go to hell when they die when they are condemned by God want to play God themselves and punish the sinners here and now. They want to punish sinners (or preferably have others punish them) who have not broken laws but who may live by moral codes that differ from their own. Despite what they supposedly believe about God punishing sinners when they die, the bigots want to see anyone who is clearly different punished, preferably before they die. Just to make sure that God doesn't overlook the sinners and let them pass into the same heaven the bigots plant to inhabit themselves.
If the sinners are wrong, these people believe, they should suffer here as well as later. For what are the sinners to blame? They're different. Bigots have no trouble trumping up reasons to condemn those they feel superior to.
To a bigot, fixing is not the focus, blaming is. To a bigot, teaching someone who is clearly at fault for something so that the same problem or error will not happen again is not as important as making someone suffer now for the fact it happened.
We each get to be blamers or teachers. Destroyers or fixers. Spies or mentors. Those between the extremes live relatively meaningless lives, lives that will result in them not being missed when they die.
Like it or not, the blamers, destroyers and spies receive more recognition when they die than the multitude in the middle between the extremes. Hitler blamed the Jews (for just about everything negative he could think of), for example, and look at how many millions of people believed him and wanted to make him emperor of the world. We remember Hitler today.
We also remember The Mahatma, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a man who singlehandedly brought the attention of the world to the atrocities and brutalities that the British were inflicting on their biggest colony, India, resulting in the country's eventual independence. Though many people died at the time of independence of India and Pakistan, no one blamed Gandhi who taught that peace was the only way to effectively change anything. The massive slaughter was based on religious prejudice--Muslims and Hindus blaming each other for their problems--not on what Gandhi achieved through peace.
Strangely enough, most of the good citizens of South Asia accepted that communal violence was wrong, they stopped blaming each other and decided that the only way for the future was to coexist peacefully. They learned, they changed and they live now in peace.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow their children without prejudice, by teaching them what is truly right and wrong.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, February 05, 2007
Should We Hang For Our thoughts?
There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
- Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
For most of us, the thoughts would convict us.
For some of us, the thoughts would be of retribution for hurts or perceived hurts committed by others against us. We suffer, they should pay. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), many of the hurts we perceive against us were not intended by the perpetrators. Maybe they were thoughtless gestures or senseless words spoken in haste or anger. Maybe they were selfish thoughts that became words that were regretted later.
For some of us, the thoughts would be of committing crimes. The crimes may be regarding vengeance, but they may also be of doing things which would benefit us financially, personally, sexually or socially.
Most of us don't follow through on those thoughts. However, an increasingly large number of people do. They break laws about drugs or prostitution, for example. Others, driven by financial need--often it's to get money to buy drugs-- commit robbery, which sometimes develops into murder or other forms of violence.
More than one in ten US citizens is in prison today. Remember your grade school classes? An average of three of the people you went to school with in any given year are behind bars. The percentage is lower in other western countries.
We should ask ourselves not how we can deter people from committing so many crimes, but how to give them what they require so they do not feel the need to resort to criminal activity to solve their problems.
Or to drugs, alcohol, gambling, prostitution or other forms of addiction. Or to securing feel-good drugs through their doctor so that they can cope with their problems and stressors. Or to abusing their spouses or children (psychologically, emotionally as well as physically) just to work off their frustrations with life.
We have psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists galore who have the professional knowledge and skills to fix the broken people among us. What we don't have is enough money to pay them to fix all the people who are broken.
Here's a novel idea. Why not provide children and adolescents that same knowledge and the same skills so that they know what to do when they run into problems in their future lives? No one breaks if they know how to avoid breaking.
No child grows up wanting to be divorced, a drug addict, a convict, an emotional minefield, a single parent, an alcoholic, a patient of a psychiatric facility. Or just plain lonely. People become that way when they can't cope with their lives.
So let's give people the knowledge and skills they need before they need it. We know where the expertise is. The experts can teach the teachers, who in turn will teach the young people.
We spend fortunes trying to fix broken people, and more fortunes trying to correct through war the behaviour of others we perceive as threats to us. Let's use the expertise we have today in the place it's needed most. Let's protect people from breaking. Let's make friends, not enemies.
The cost? A trifling sum compared to what we spend today on police, courts, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, health care and war. What the "new" cost would be would be returned in lower costs for the other "services" within a matter of years.
And we could have much happier and healthier people. It's not as impossible as it sounds. A whole solution, including implementation program is provided in the book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the big picture look clearer.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
For most of us, the thoughts would convict us.
For some of us, the thoughts would be of retribution for hurts or perceived hurts committed by others against us. We suffer, they should pay. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), many of the hurts we perceive against us were not intended by the perpetrators. Maybe they were thoughtless gestures or senseless words spoken in haste or anger. Maybe they were selfish thoughts that became words that were regretted later.
For some of us, the thoughts would be of committing crimes. The crimes may be regarding vengeance, but they may also be of doing things which would benefit us financially, personally, sexually or socially.
Most of us don't follow through on those thoughts. However, an increasingly large number of people do. They break laws about drugs or prostitution, for example. Others, driven by financial need--often it's to get money to buy drugs-- commit robbery, which sometimes develops into murder or other forms of violence.
More than one in ten US citizens is in prison today. Remember your grade school classes? An average of three of the people you went to school with in any given year are behind bars. The percentage is lower in other western countries.
We should ask ourselves not how we can deter people from committing so many crimes, but how to give them what they require so they do not feel the need to resort to criminal activity to solve their problems.
Or to drugs, alcohol, gambling, prostitution or other forms of addiction. Or to securing feel-good drugs through their doctor so that they can cope with their problems and stressors. Or to abusing their spouses or children (psychologically, emotionally as well as physically) just to work off their frustrations with life.
We have psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists galore who have the professional knowledge and skills to fix the broken people among us. What we don't have is enough money to pay them to fix all the people who are broken.
Here's a novel idea. Why not provide children and adolescents that same knowledge and the same skills so that they know what to do when they run into problems in their future lives? No one breaks if they know how to avoid breaking.
No child grows up wanting to be divorced, a drug addict, a convict, an emotional minefield, a single parent, an alcoholic, a patient of a psychiatric facility. Or just plain lonely. People become that way when they can't cope with their lives.
So let's give people the knowledge and skills they need before they need it. We know where the expertise is. The experts can teach the teachers, who in turn will teach the young people.
We spend fortunes trying to fix broken people, and more fortunes trying to correct through war the behaviour of others we perceive as threats to us. Let's use the expertise we have today in the place it's needed most. Let's protect people from breaking. Let's make friends, not enemies.
The cost? A trifling sum compared to what we spend today on police, courts, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, health care and war. What the "new" cost would be would be returned in lower costs for the other "services" within a matter of years.
And we could have much happier and healthier people. It's not as impossible as it sounds. A whole solution, including implementation program is provided in the book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the big picture look clearer.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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