In the previous letter, I briefly discussed representative democracy, brushed over the processes of law creation, lobbyist influence, and political party stalemating. It is within representative democracy that laws are created and federal spending is decided. Current FY budget proposals are released each year on, or just before, Valentine’s Day (social distraction). Often in the United States, you will hear catch phrases such as “greatest country on Earth” or “Love it or leave it”. These are rather ignorant popular sayings. One can clearly look around American society and see flocks of homeless people, a good portion of American families living under the poverty rate, government subsistence programs growing, fraud and abuse of government assistance, drugs flooded into lower economic areas, unemployment rates (not including the incarcerated population) , crimes such as home invasions, murder and armed robberies, child abductions and rape, and all kinds of other negative social issues ranging from identity theft to gang activity. Of course, our congressional representatives are not as interested in these issues as they are in producing the same silent song and dance of passing laws on behalf of billion dollar corporations and appeasing foreign governments whose lobbyist minions fill congressional pockets with promises. Therefore, the possibility of the United States to better herself and all of her people and to avoid future deterioration (economically, morally, politically, intellectually, and socially), falls heavily on the American people themselves. There is a silent consensus in the United States that the government does not place the priorities of the American people first. If you watch congressional decision making long enough, you will soon see this truth to be self-evident. The question becomes: what do we, as Americans, do about it? Do we await a superhero to swoop down and save the day? Do we just give up and go with the winds of deterioration, as our social fabric of humanity rots from the interior, with little concern for our children’s future? Do we just continue a path of apathy and consumption (developed largely from the inorganic mass-produced popular culture by those who have consolidated the capitalist means of mass production)?
In my opinion, and I am only one man, the answer is awareness, understanding, education (whether formal or informal), and the passing of that education, experience, awareness to our children earlier in their development process. This process is vital on the home front using the public school system as a supplemental educational system (with official documentation trail) and education resources. If you analyze the goals of public school systems, the state mandated curriculums are centered on meeting state funding allotments and minimum state standardized tests (key word minimum), and quite frankly have become more and more situated to fail (making way for the privatization of public schools which will pull from state funding, while making private profits, similar to how the private prison industry.
This is one of the things I am attempting to do in these letters to your sister and you. How do we do make positive mass social change? How do we create a movement promoting positive intellectual, positive economic, positive moral and positive political awareness to promote the American people and build a stronger future for you and your children (and their children)? How can we challenge the constant stream of negative, immoral, self-destructive popular culture that is mass produced to the American people (mass consumers) with a positive movement for the collective? It is not an easy problem. What began as innocent consumption of inorganic popular culture in the 1970s, has achieved irreversible damage to the social structure of our society in 2012. For over three generations now, the television has been the centerpiece of the American family. As the inorganic mass produced popular culture has continued to decline in moral values, distraction from awareness of serious social issues in the U.S., and produced an elegant avoidance on congressional decision making….the consumer (the American children that quickly becomes the American adult) has continued to drop in intellectual worth, critical thinking ability, over moral structure and has vastly increased in apathy, consumerism and has become quite desensitized to crime, murder, sexual depravity, broken family units, and have become quite distracted, apathetic and ignorant to almost all issues of importance within self, family unit, community, society and overall nation-state. Basically, very few people care about anything of importance while the majority of people care about meaningless issues, drama, celebrity scandals, and bullshit. Quite possibly, a contributing factor is that most Americans feel as if they are unable to change anything if they wanted to. I believe this to be incorrect and believe society and community change begin in the individual family unit atom.
The solution, in my opinion, is raw and true education on the home front, no matter how difficult or ugly that education is. Each American, if inflicted, must break the chains of apathy and meaningless individual drama in favor of educating themselves and their children. They must sacrifice the time to educate their children. At some point, a gross assumption developed among the American people….the gross assumption that the public school system was responsible for educating their children.
Let us return to the first paragraph and the social ills deteriorating our current society. One such area that we should address is the mass incarceration in the United States and the deluge of drugs on American streets. Why is this so important?
Drugs are everywhere, but are concentrated heavily in lower economic areas. The concentration of drugs in lower economic areas is assumed to raise crime rates in an already economically impoverished area, therefore justifying a high concentration of police in those lower economic areas. Does the hiring of police officers create jobs? Are those police areas from the lower economic area they patrol? The combination of drugs and police in lower economic areas results in higher incarceration rates in the lower economic communities. Are drugs available in upper class communities? Yes. Only members of the upper class communities have secure places to do drugs and capital (money) to hire good lawyers to avoid any serious consequences within the justice system if they are arrested. In the lower economic areas, the majorities of people have little money to protect them from the so-called justice system and are often swept into the incarceration system. Regardless of personal views on drugs, drugs are currently illegal and result in criminal prosecution. People should avoid drugs for multiple reasons mainly the economic, judicial, and social consequences. I am not justifying drug usage, but feel that I must break down the current structure, an issue that young people in lower economics do not fully understand: A) drugs and crime bring down the property values of a community and therefore no new businesses will enter into a high crime area and therefore less jobs are available to raise a lower economic area up. B) The prison system is on the stock market. When state prisons become full, inmates must be outsourced to a private prison corporation which bills (and drains) the state budget, and thus the federal budget. Here we have a social trap. Drugs are glamorized in inorganic popular culture (corporately owned) such as television, music, and movies. Drugs are flooded in poor areas. Police are flooded in poor areas. As a result, even though lower economic people should be able to identify the social trap, lower economic people are incarcerated and caught up in the so-called justice system. Three results occur: 1) Lower economic population control 2) Masking of true unemployment rates in the U.S. under a consolidated capitalist economy developing faster and faster technology that reduces the required manual (human) labor of workers 3) Future educational, economical and career opportunities are stagnated and destroyed, trapping the lower economic individual in lower economic status 4) Lower economic communities continue to wither instead of build.
At this point in the letter, I advise you to research the history concerning the so-called “war on drugs” and incarceration rates before and after the privatization process. I believe the first private prison corporation was ‘Corrections Corporation of America’ originally based out of Nashville, Tennessee. I also suggest you research into economic and racial demographics for non-violent offenders, and analyze the growing number of incarcerated inmates as they are not included in the national unemployment numbers.
As one example of political corruption, or as I referred to it earlier as a social trap, concerning drugs in the United States, I recommend that you study the Iran-Contra hearings and accusations of drug trafficking into the United States (urban Los Angeles) by the CIA in 1984.
What needs to be understood by our children? First and foremost, cause and effect. Our youth is sucked into the criminal justice system at an alarming rate. Not every American youth gets sucked in to the private prison sector, but they are sucked in just enough to get a criminal record which closes doors on future considerations and advancement possibilities. Again, it is a social trap; a carrot under a box. It certainly damages their future credibility, especially if they had the inspiration to represent their brethren, their American peers. The old, bullshit reverse psychology of “drugs are bad” doesn’t work. Every basic psychologist understands that most teenagers rebel against their parents or the social structure at some point during their mental and social development toward adulthood. We, as Americans, need to stop the useless and boring droll-drum babble about drugs and begin to break down all levels of information on the system to our youth. Example: Drugs are purposely concentrated in your lower economic areas and as a result, a heavy police presence is also concentrated in your area. Subconsciously, through mass production of popular culture in the forms of music and movies….drug usage and the false assumption of fast and easy money are constantly glorified and embedded in the American mindset from youth. This is especially noticeable in mainstream hip-hop music. The results might be vastly different, if our American youth were realistically prepared and educated by their parents concerning the reality of the situation, but for the most case (judging by incarceration rates), we are caught in a vicious cycle and until now have been unable to break free of this worsening cycle. Parents must explain the system to their children instead of allowing them to walk directly into the trap.
The result of this kind of positive movement toward true education could have multiple positive repercussions on our society. Just using the social trap of drugs as an example, if a true collective educational movement (organic, not inorganic) were to begin on a mass scale: 1) A decrease in incarceration rates 2) A decline in the supply and demand of drugs (drugs like cocaine and crack are not organically made in the concrete jungles of the United States), 3) Less criminal records on the youth would provide better opportunities for youth advancement in society and advancement of collective society 4) A decline in drug volumes in a lower economic community would eventually reduce crime and raise property values, thus allowing new businesses to come in and create jobs. We have to clean up the United States and we have to do so as a collective people.
For now, my daughters, we will move on to the next letter.
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