We Have Solutions for Drugs, Violence and Abuse

"When the first human being began to write, he or she set the world upon a new evolution. Similarly, if a few individuals have the strength and the power to walk way from the restrictions of the world and to stand fearlessly beyond it, eventually in some distant millennium, all mankind will also come to that same liberation. It will be a special pleasure for you to look back, poised in some place in eternity, and know that you were there at the beginning of the movement. Your gift was that you realized at an early stage that you were indeed eternal, immortal, and infinite, and that you had the courage to walk with that idea in your heart while the rest of mankind said that such a limitless overview wasn't true or even possible."
- Stuart Wilde

Some will read that quote and assume that Wilde was encouraging people to do the impossible. That which is most certainly impossible to accomplish is what we believe is impossible.

We are all abundantly familiar with impossible things that were accomplished in the past. Look what was accomplished once the wheel was invented. Indeed, look at the magnificent structures that were built before the wheel, including the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the awe-inspiring structures that were built in South and Central America.

Transporation without the assistance of animal power was unthinkable. Flying through the air was out of the question except in the imaginations of visionaries such as da Vinci and a few others. Travel into airless space couldn't be considered except in fairy tales or the minds of science fiction writers. Cures and preventives for all sorts of diseases and genetic defects weren't seriously considered a century ago.

Now we want peace in the world, peace in our communities, peace in our families and peace within our hearts. Impossible?

No. The biggest obstacle to overcome is the belief that these are inevitable consequences of our modern technological world. They are not, no matter how often ultra conservatives try to make us believe they are.

Is terrorism necessary? No more essential than the anarchist movements of a century ago where its participants committed many of the same acts as today's terrorists. Yet how often do we hear about the "terrorist" period at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th? It's lost to most students of history, even today.

Such movements as today's brand of terrorism have causes and perpetrators. These can be addressed. Not with weapons, which obviously only makes the perpetrators work harder and their causes more attractive. With education, so that the large majority of good people will collectively come together to silence the violent ones.

Drugs, murders, home invasions, road rage (implicated in as much as 80 percent of road accidents today according to the Ontario Provincial Police) and abuse of women and children, each of which is increasing at an alarming rate, have causes that may be addressed.

Building more prisons and hiring more police isn't working because they do not address the causes of these social ills. Trying to solve them when the perpetrators are already involved with their offences is like trying to solve the high rate of divorce by training more family counselors. It's too late then.

The only place to deal with social problems is before they begin, with children. We must teach children what they need to know. We must provide children with what they need other than "the basics" at school and scoldings for misbehaviour at home.

Before that, we need to teach the teachers who will spend more time with our children than most parents do each day. And we need to teach parents before they have children about what all is involved with parenting beyond what they already know.

We know the solutions. We know that teachers and parents must be able to address the needs of children with regards to their social and their emotional development. Not enough people know about those, so the ones who do must be encouraged to speak and to spread their message.

So long as most of us remain ignorant about the unaddressed needs of people and how these could be satisfied by fairly easy changes to education curricula, we will suffer the consequences of our ignorance.

But understand this: we have the solutions already. The message isn't known by enough people.

Yet. You could do your part.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to get the word out to every part of the world.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Exercise Is For Sleepwalkers

I believe that every human has a finite number of heart-beats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.
- Neil Armstrong

There comes a time while running the rat race that some of the participants stop to realize that racing with the rats is not as physically stimulating as their bodies need. Their minds, their emotions, their intellect, their very being has been absorbed by working hard to earn money for their employer (and for themselves so they can buy the products sold by their employer and other providers of rat race facilities) that they have become physically unfit.

As a result of some epiphany--a heart attack, a movie, the death of a friend or a warning from their doctor--they decide that they must exercise their bodies. So they join a fitness club and do what they are used to doing, devoting their entire time and energies during that period each day to exercising their bodies.

They seem to have two primary objectives for this period of physical stress: exercising their bodies as much as they can (preferably their hearts as well) and giving their brains a total rest.

As neutral observers we might be tempted to believe that this commitment to focussing their minds on the work of their bodies, be it on machines or on a track or pavement, is required to do the job of exercising well. However, that belief would be erroneous. With the possible exception of counting sequentially, the brain is not required for any of these exercises.

Exercising, either in a gym or outside, is time for brain-sleep.

Of all the possible ways in which a body could be put to use for the purpose of accomplishing something--with or without the brain in gear--these people choose to do nothing but stretch and contract their muscles for the entire period of their "workout."

I decline to offer ways in which a person could use their time beneficially while exercising to help their families, their community, the underprivileged, the homeless or many other causes because that would require me to assume that you can't think of any yourself. I choose to give you more credit than that.

I will ask that you consider, if you know someone who fits into this category of person who stops running the rat race just long enough to do the kind of activity a gerbil does on a wheel, suggesting to this person that their time might be spend more productively to make the world a little better place while getting the same amount of physical exercise for their bodies.

But please don't be any less gentle with your suggestion than the man who did the very first moonwalk, Neil Armstrong. Now there was someone who had more to do with his time than gerbil-race.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to help people keep it real.
Learn more at http://billallin.com