Homelessness is not a Federal Issue
So many thoughts this week, but the one I want to focus on is homelessness, meaninglessness, and our drug “crisis.”
I guess my libertarian side is coming out, because I think our talking heads have it all wrong, this week Trump especially. He has suggested that the homelessness situation in some of California's cities is a disaster.
It is, but it's not his problem …
Sept. 11: Thank You
This September 11th, I'd like to just take a few moments to remember what our people died for.
They died for an idea, that idea being that individuals have rights, endowed by our creator, that these are individual rights afford to each and every person, and that these should be the foundation of every free state.
A Common Enterprise
So here's the thing about labor. We should celebrate those who work hard to give us the life we've got. It doesn't take a lot of imagination, or a long course in history to see that imbalances in power can lead to a pretty gruelling life for those who would be employed.
And working people fought hard and they fought justly for what should have been their natural right to organize and negotiate for fair conditions and wages.
That said, they would not have had anything to fight for if it hadn't been for the visionaries who worked hard to organize labor into productive enterprises.
Avoiding Civil War
So it looks like people are trying to point us towards a new peaceful revolution. The thing is that this is not how revolutions work. They are bloody. They lead to civil unrest, war, people killing each other in great number for stupid reasons.
And it's coming from the left. It's the thought police, the language of disgust, usually a shrill disgust from the far left declaiming that anything to its right does not see the world correctly, and further is racist, xenophobic, and malevolently aligned to keep the “good people” down.
And who are the good people?
Thought for February, 2019
I suppose it's one of the scariest things for a writer, a blank screen and an empty head. I seem to have all sorts of ideas when I am in other places, but when I sit down in front of a computer, I let it take me to all sorts of places that I may not have originally intended, today it was back over my campaign page (simple, but I still like it, and the supporting blog).
What I'm left with is that I am a damned good writer. And I'm feeling guilty that I'm writing at all when I “should” be organizing myself to teach the forty or so children with whose lives I am at the moment entrusted.
I'm teaching middle school English, and a good chunk of my classes are “at risk” students. It's hard to get where these kids come from. I always had two parents who were always available to me. I don't know violence. I don't know neglect. I don't know what it's like to not have a place that feels like home.
I suppose if you don't have a home, or feel like you don't, you create one, and if all that is around you is dysfunction, there's a good chance that the foundations of that home will have some flaws.
Now when you stack on that a system built for a different time, on a different background, assuming a different base experience, it's unlikely you're going to be in a spot to create the best results.
Now, the problem here is that we try to cure dysfunction, but don't actually define functional. With these kids, “what should be” is often a function of “what shouldn't,” as opposed to some ideal we can define, measure, and work toward.
And when I look bigger, I think it's America's founding fathers' understanding of this that gave us the framework that made us great. We recognize that everyone has the right to define his own great and work toward that. Further, we got that for each person to have the space to do this for himself, we must limit the abilities of others to shape our vision, and this is the genius of governments of limited powers.
