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To the Futurework List and Friends:
Its Spring and the Doctrine of Pre-Emption relates
to the desire to Clean House. We can go to war against the dirt or we can
come from a place of love as in imaging our effort as an act of loving our world
into a greater good. The Psy-Ops operation in Iraq has an element of that
in the story that things will be better once we have "Cleaned House" over
there. Remember the war began on the first day of Spring as
well.
But cleaning abroad while there is rot at home is a
typical problem that disconnects even the best of intentions. Here
are some candidates for a Spring Cleaning right here at home. I
would be encouraged if each made lists of their own during this time and worked
at coming up to the courage of the Americans who sent 200,000 troops into a
civilization of millions where each carry their own guns and know how to use
them. The right cleanser makes a big difference and is far superior
to simple elbow grease but even that is no good if there is no desire to clean
the "inside of the cleaner" as well.
Nine lessons on Pre-emptive Strikes: or what we should first fix within ourselves before we spend everything on fixing the Iraqis. We owe them for damages in the war and that is getting worse by the moment in this exercise of male dominance masquerading as morality. If we don't fix this first in ourselves it will cost us much more than this pitiful little country would ever be able to inflict with its pitiful weapons program. Inner rot is much worse than external attack and creates the kind of weakness that makes us vulnerable to such things. ENVIRONMENT; 1. American Chemical Industry has scattered extreme chemicals throughout neighborhoods in America. Several years ago a fuel tank on Stanton Island exploded and caused extensive damage throughout the neighborhood where it was located. That has been now moved to another location due to community pressure. I knew the nice people who did not take care of the chemical plant at Bhopal. They are wonderful people but they were wrong to have that chemical plant where they did. Thousands were injured and are to this day as a result. There are many tanks, plants etc. located throughout Texas, Oklahoma and other places where a well placed bomb could destroy the lives of thousands of people. The chemical industry in Hoboken, N.J. could kill five million people if a well placed bomb released a chemical cloud that covered the right areas. The Chemical Industry has been as duplicitous as Sadaam Hussein in avoiding inspectors in fact in circumventing inspections in the Congress of the US through well placed moneys. I can tell you that a refusal to face the possibility of a security breach will not only destroy the people around the plant but will destroy the company who allowed it and the individual lives of the people who refused to consider security a part of the price of doing business in the United States. I will close with a story about Tobyhanna Depot where I used to own a vacation mobile home down wind from that government Weapons of Mass Destruction facility. SOCIETY: 2. Militias and private Armies: To avoid the potential conflict between armies of fanatics on the Right and Left would it not be prudent to disarm them before they do more than just blow up another Morrow Building? FAMILY: 3. Cutting the children lose:
What kind of programs would you
develop to pre-empt the obvious personal failures that come about as a result of
bad training and parenting (on both Right and Left) that severely limit the
experience and imagination of the individuals ability to choose?
SOCIETY: 4. Underfunding Cultural quality and trusting it to the neutrality of the Marketplace: What kind of pre-emptive programs would you institute to short circuit ignorance of quality of life issues that create waste, a trashy community and family environment and the overuse of important natural resources, and a culturally dumb population that can only do simple things and considers the purchase of physical products their culture while "Playing the Mockingbird" to every other culture in the world? FAMILY: 5. Caring for one's Parents when they have given everything to you that they had: How can you pre-emptively avoiding wasting
important:
SOCIETY: 6. Those who would destroy the deep levels of community: The Marines travel on the concept of team.
Superior teams coupled with technologically superior cultural products make
small teams able to handle competition with vast numbers of less organized
enemies. How can we pre-emptively destroy the tendency to
waste community cultural processes that give balance to the constant war between
individual achievement and team synergy that goes beyond what one individual can
accomplish?
ENVIRONMENT: 7. Those who would eat the world and leave nothing for the children: Alexander said to his father: "Leave me something to
conquer". How can we pre emptively moderate the human
tendency to fill up all space and use up all resources and the "future be
damned?"
8. Toleration of those who would benefit from the destruction of the world: Steve Forbes when being questioned about making millions of dollars on a tax cut that he was advocating: "Well what's wrong with that?" How can we pre-emptively strike at the heart of the tendency for the wealthy to feel deprived and the deprived to feel guilty for failing when they had no chance in the first place due to a lack of capital? (America is now behind Europe in mobility from one economic class to another.) If we believe that economic stability and upward mobility will heal Iraq, why not try it pre-emptively here at home re-assert the truth of the Horatio Alger myth since it seems to have become the exception in our society. SPIRITUALITY:
9. Misreading our "role" as children to the Creator of All. Or those who would bring children indiscriminately into the world and prepare them only to feed on those who don't bring children indiscriminately into the world or the lessons of the Teacher and what it means to be free. How can we pre-emptively understand the difference between being the child of the Creator and being "Childish", "Infantile" and lacking Adult Personal Mastery? How can we pre-emptively eliminate saving money on education while spending it on incarceration after the murder?" How can we break the belief that there is something sacred about a 32 bar song form endlessly repeated with similar words making the world numbingly predictable until we turn the real death of soldiers into Television entertainment to make us feel like we are alive since we saw that they were the ones who died so we must be alive, right? Since we have already elevated live action death in war to
entertainment, how can we avoid being addicted to it for the same number of
years as was Rome?
Ray Evans Harrell |
