Tag Archives: tit for tat

The World Is Going to Die Again and It’s Up To Me to Stop It

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star-wars-darth-vader-senseSome years ago, when I was doing graduate school, I used to have to judge speech competitions between different colleges and universities. It was mostly fun, but one event I hated more than anything else was persuasive speaking, which boiled down to ten minute speeches that pretty much blamed the audience for a problem that was destroying the world and how each audience member was now responsible for fixing whatever was wrong. It would go something like: “Evil pharmaceutical companies are making drugs that are hooking people on curing symptoms rather than the actual problem itself. This is really bad, and YOU must do something about this to make things better.” And usually they’d mention my responsibility was now to contact my congressman, start a letter writing campaign, stop taking drugs, or whatever. But it always came back on me.  I was the solution.

Well, I never bought that. In that scenario, pharmaceutical companies, doctors and insurance companies are the cause. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: They don’t give a rat’s ass what I think about it. They’re not going to stop because I tell them they need to stop. My congressman is not going to tell them to stop because I told him to do so. And if I’m taking pharmaceuticals to keep myself from dying of diabetes, chances are pretty good that I’m not going to just stop taking my medication because it makes some hippy kid in college feel better about himself/herself in that he or she got back at big bad pharma by delivering a speech condemning them.

Which brings me to Noam Chomsky. It seems that Noam has a diatribe about how something’s wrong with America, and how Americans need to stop doing what Americans do and somehow fix the world. Sounds great. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, Noam. The people who are contributing to the problem aren’t Americans. It’s the corporations that own Americans, their media and their legislators. Sure, “Americans” can change their ways and make things better, but they won’t, mainly because the ones that need to do the actual work don’t give a rat’s ass about the people who are being hurt. They only care about the profits. And as long as both political parties are part of the profit process, they’re not going to care either. Which means, NO ONE will do anything to make a difference.

And that’s the problem right there. Much like some freshman in college, Noam somehow thinks that shaming the average American citizen is somehow going to get that average American to take up his cause and somehow make things better, much like those underwear gnomes who claim 3 steps to profit, with step two detailed out as “????”. It’s a great sentiment, but in case Noam doesn’t know this, he has much more financial clout than I have, a much louder voice that people listen to, and so many more opportunities to make a difference. Yet, until I just read his article in Salon.com, I haven’t heard a peep from him about practically anything. Being a professional complainer might be fun, but it isn’t any more capable of making a difference than sitting in the basement and playing a full night of World of Warcraft. If you want to make a difference, you actually have to do something, not just complain about things that are wrong.

The real problem with America is that Americans are now to the point where they just don’t care. The problems we’ve created are so large and looming that it’s easier to watch American Idol and hope that the people we elected are smart enough to get the big things done. The dilemma is that the people we elected aren’t capable of solving these things. They’re not even capable of running the government so it doesn’t collapse on itself, forcing us into recessions, depressions and sequesters. Those are the people we’re looking to in hopes of making things better.

Right now, we have a large percentage of Americans who are more concerned about having a job tomorrow than they are about whether or not global warming is going to destroy a farm in Kenya. We should be concerned that North Korea and Iran are gravitating towards nuclear weapons, but we’re more frightened of being caught on the wrong side of town when it gets dark, because now gangs run freely in certain areas without any fear of being harassed by the police. We should care about the economies of small countries that have people in destitution, but when the majority of western wealth is held in the hands of less than 1 percent of the population and that the local police receive assurances from the Supreme Court that they’re not required to actually protect the people they serve rather than the government that hired them, there’s more of a problem that Noam isn’t going to come close solving because he’s as out of touch with the bigger picture as those who he complains about.

So how do we make things better?  Simple. Make people care. But we don’t do that well because the organizations that do that are all about focus issues that are funded by lots of money. Not surprisingly, there’s no money behind “cleaning up the streets”, “putting people to work so they don’t join gangs”, or even “separate the 1 percent from the majority of the money.” When we do care and create movements like Occupy Wall Street, we ridicule these people and act like they’re inconveniencing us instead. To that, I don’t have a solution because unlike others, I’m willing to admit I’m just as much a part of the problem as anyone else. No one else seems to care, so it becomes so hard to try to care myself. As a matter of fact, it’s exhausting.

So, next time someone writes an article about what WE need to do, my first thought is “what are YOU doing first?” Quite often, the person hasn’t really thought it through, or more likely, hopes you just won’t figure that out.

Solving the Middle East Problems is like Dating a Supermodel Who Sees You Only as a Friend

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It’s 2010, and politicians are still trying to solve the “Middle East Crisis”, and they’re doing so by doing exactly what everyone has done before and hoping for different results. As we all know by now, by the overused analogy by Einstein, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results is the definition of insanity.

We really need to face it: We’re not going to solve the crisis in the Middle East by doing what everyone has tried to do in the past. Getting people to talk is not a solution. It’s not even a stop-gap until we come up with a solution. One side hates the other so much it wants to kill everyone on the other side. The other side is so angry at the other side for hating it throughout history that they’ve pretty much resorted to the same tactics of killing those guys as well. Everyone involved remembers EVERYTHING bad that ever happened, and wants justice and retribution for every bad thing that happened. Neither side remembers a single bad thing they have done, so they don’t seem to see any problems but the ones being caused by the other side.

A major part of the problem is that everyone who tries to negotiate peace does so as if everyone involved has the goal of actually achieving peace. That’s not what they want. Maybe 60 years ago that might have been the case, but some decades ago, it became much more about achieving small, specific goals. All peace negotiations were centered around not achieving those goals in hopes of achieving peace. Bad idea. Not sustainable. Obviously, because now they’re back to killing each other again.

So, how do you solve the problem? Well, here’s what you don’t do: Don’t act as if getting them back to the negotiating table is actual progress. Both sides are usually willing to talk. Neither side is actually willing to do anything to create an atmosphere of peace. They both want their own gains and the demise of the other side. You really don’t have much room to negotiate when it comes down to that.

So, again, what is the solution?

Work it out over time by investing in the future of both entities. This means just giving up on the current actors involved because face it: They’re not going to do anything to further peace. But that doesn’t mean their offspring can’t be influenced. But you have to do it by setting a new paradigm and a new way of looking at things. You also have to go out of your way to not engage the parents in any way, to show future generations that we don’t reward bad people for doing bad things. Until we start to engage this way, we’re always going to be stuck with the current generation that is only going to continue to think in the ways of the erroneous past.

So, how do you do this? I mean, the parents are still around. You can’t just ignore them, right? Actually, I think you can. That’s not to say we can’t still engage them in the hopes of getting them to see the light, but we should go into every negotiation with the belief that the parents are really the problem, so we’re probably not going to achieve any success from them any way. However, we should constantly let it be known that we’re investing in their future, not in them because we’ve already seen that no matter what we do, they’re just going to screw up the future regardless.

This doesn’t mean we just disengage. What it means is that we take a different approach in all things foreign affairs. Our goal should be to start influencing neighbors everywhere by a process of dealing with foreign countries on an honest, straight-forward approach. I know this is a lot different than the old CIA-overthrowing dictators technique we used before, but it may take a generation or two to convince people of our resolve, but once on that path, we’d have a chance of influencing the rest of the world in a new way of handling international affairs. This might also bring to the table the future generations of these countries in the Middle East whose parents we gave up on after realizing that they are never going to understand anything but hate.

I know I’ve made a lot of jokes on how to handle international affairs (Puppy Diplomacy and the Elmo Theory of Containment), but I’m pretty serious about this. I originally called this approach the Friendship Over Time (FOT) Theory, and it’s a mathematics-based foreign affairs approach that involves iterative contacts with countries rather than incremental approaches and our current method of unilateral tit for tat (but never following it up) diplomacy.

As the title of this post indicates, our current process is a lot like dating a supermodel who is only capable of seeing you as a friend. It sounds like a great idea, and it might make you look good when you’re out on a date, but in the end, you’re going to go home every night hating yourself, wondering why she can never see you as anything better. For women, it’s a lot like dating me. Okay, that doesn’t make sense, but I assure you there’s a really funny joke in there somewhere.

Right now, Secretary of State H. Clinton is trying to make a name for herself by deluding herself into believing that bringing the Middle East heads of state to the table is actually accomplishing something. Instead, what it is going to do is set up a new process of disappointment that will most definitely lead to hostilities, broken promises and further deterioration of potential peace in the Middle East. I really wish people could see that instead of leading us down a false path of hope, thinking that somehow people who hate each other are somehow going to change their natural way of being.