Supplemental Note #1 - The Question: What will become of our children after we are gone?

What is the heaviest question that every parent has, either quietly within themselves or in confidence with their partner, considered and heavily reflected on many times; a question that if not considered would call into question the quality, responsibility and true character of the human element?  It is the reoccurring question of what will become of our children after we are gone.  What if we died tomorrow?  What if we died ten years from now?  What if we lived to an old age?  Many people may consider this a morbid query, and perhaps it is, although it is a realistic and required mental planning exercise.  Many will retort with confidence that they have set up trust funds or savings for their children, but are these sufficient measures for the future?  I certainly would not discourage the effort, but is it enough?  A prime example of the devaluation of a currency can be found in 1991 with the decline of the Russian Ruble after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.   Do you believe the American dollar will reign supreme forever?  Will setting money to the side be enough?  More importantly, not all citizens are able to establish an economic cushion for their offspring.  Look at the world around us and especially at the current society and culture of our United States.  Will our children’s generation be the generation that grows up in the ashes of the Roman Empire, or will it be their children’s children?  Our society is in moral decline as morally void crimes and drug abuse are rampant, and the economy continues to decline as the nation, often by the hands of the oft-lobbyist corruptible politicians, increases an irreparable fiscal deficit that will eventually devalue the paper money.  Will our children be prepared to enter into such a world?  Have we laid a sufficient moral, intellectual, and physical foundation for their well-being?  Have we instructed them well enough concerning the brutal atrocities and victimizations that can be found daily, and have been viewed many times over, within the current cultural condition of the American human element that they are born into?  Have we provided them with critical thinking abilities flexible enough to span from the university to the lower economic streets, and the ability to listen, watch and make solid character judgments (even though many men attempt to conceal their true character or do not display their true character until faced with their own lower base desires)?

How does one prepare their children for social, economic, and community self-sufficiency?  Five areas of teaching and understanding come to mind: (1) Understanding the base and animal elements in the composition of the human element (2) Understanding the composition of demographics and history  (3) Understanding the economic classes  (4) Understanding religious ideologies, history of the religious ideologies and religious factions within those ideologies  (5) Understanding the political composition of the American government system and how those ideologies impact human decision making.

Understanding the composition of the human element is the root lesson that must be introduced to our children.  Humanity is an incredibly unique creation with choice, the ability to rationalize, feel emotions, remember memories, and learn.  Sadly, the American human element is often in a weak intellectual condition as a result of force fed mass corporate produced influences (television, movies, music, video games) which our children have become dependent on because their parents have become dependent on, and poor public schooling (with no parental mentoring or education at home).  When left in an intellectually state of malnutrition, the human element becomes quite vulnerable to lower base desires. 

What are some of the base desires that impact the human element and prevents society from collective growth?  One base desire is greed, the love of money and possessions and power (or the illusion that these things can be compiled quickly without hard work and dedication), like a child that does not understand sharing (for community) or similar to an animal taking a physically weaker species’ food.  Is this Darwinism?  Yet, unlike animals, we are human beings with the ability to think, choose, and feel.  When a person is controlled by base desires such as greed, that person will steal, rob or betray their fellow human being without contemplation or reflection.   Lust is another base desire that leads to betrayal, broken families and even sexual assault or rape.  The point here is that we must somehow teach our children to be able, to the best of their ability, to identify those within the human group, who can be identified by daily deeds and words, which are most likely controlled by base desires in order to avoid interaction with them.  Some people can still be educated and civilized in order to contribute to human society, but many are beyond that window and are ingrained by lower base desires.

Understanding the composition of demographics, history, and economic classes are also vital to understanding.  How I often have considered what it would be like if the various peoples of the United States were one, at minimum in mind and respect.  During my years in Japan, I watched and observed the Japanese people and, while I am sure there were demographical differences that I could not comprehend as a foreigner, they were all of black hair and specific ethnicity.  They obviously did not have the racial discord that we face due to our ugly slave history in the United States.  Our children must be taught to research true history, no matter how ugly, for their understanding of current society.  In the United States, the media and the public schools will teach about the holocaust in Europe while barely brushing over the transatlantic slave trade, domestic American slavery and racial segregation.  Slavery and segregation were massive portions of American history and the economic and social ramifications are still present today.  Another example is the history of land confiscation and corrupt treatment toward the original people of North America as well as the geographic locations and interior political, economic structures of remaining reservations.  There are many more examples, but those are the two that come to the forefront of my thoughts while writing this supplemental note.  As America has a vast diversity of ethnic groups, each group has a history and not all of them have been pleasant, and all are tied together in the movement toward the future.  There are many members of various ethnic groups that are positive members of the American human element and willing to work among ethnic groups to pursue a healthy future for American children, but there are also those who make profits and a living by inciting division and hate among American ethnic groups.  I believe that American children require the understanding of true American history in order to understand the social, economic, ethnic and political segregation (division) caused by those histories.  The people of the United States will never advance and secure a better future with so many isolated groups, which resemble a power of balance model pertaining to nation-states in international politics allowing the most powerful to keep the less powerful pitted against each other in competition.  By keeping the masses segregated into small conflicting groups, those pulling the strings can divert collective domestic attention and keep the masses suspicious and against each other.  Economic demographics is important for our teachings because once our children truly understand history, they will begin to view the American economic caste differently.  They will be able to identify the economic gap between (a majority of) descendants of slavery and the descendants of banking systems which dealt in slavery and land, while distinguishing poor ethnic groups and post-Civil War immigration waves that population the lower economic class in the United States.  They will be able to identify the working class whites who immigrated after 1865.  They will be able to understand the actual wealth distribution in the United States (if it lasts in the face of globalization, consolidation, and internationalization of corporations) where 5% of the American population own over 90% of the wealth leaving 95% of the population to fight over the 10% crumbs.  We want our children to be able to research the facts and understand how the government uses money acquired by taxation for private sector profiteering, foreign aid, nation rebuilding, and debt foolishness while at the same time being able to identify demographic groups which do not attempt to contribute to American society and are satisfied with collecting government entitlements and cheese while draining the taxed working class.  Our children are free to make their decisions for the future, but it is recommended that they avoid interaction with those who do not want to positively build for the future.   Indeed, this is a very broad category, but if we think about the amount of time that our American children spend on television and video games, we realize that there is ample time to encourage our children to learn in-depth about their history, and the back alley corridors of our American economic-political structure surrounding them and their peers.  To truly have positive collective advancement, every child, regardless of ethnicity, must understand the history whether it humiliates them, makes them feel ashamed, shocks them or upsets them, in order to comprehend the many ideologies within their society, include all members of a society, and advance the most positive ideologies and efforts while discarding the negative …only then can we come to terms and advance as one people.

One of the heaviest influences on the thinking and actions of people is in their core religious ideologies.  Even in the absence of religious and moral ideologies, the thinking (or non-thinking) and actions of people can be viewed and contemplated to predict and understand behavior patterns.  It is a dark gray area between the indoctrinations of man-made organized religions and no spiritual structure at all.  Religious and moral ideologies, along with all ideologies in general, are established through three main venues: Indoctrination, life experiences and self-education.  Therefore, understanding religious ideologies and the various ideological factions within major religions impacting the United States, the West and the overall international stage is very important.  It would seem that as humanity has made technological leaps and bounds that the majority of humans would have broken free of ancient flat-world religious ideologies long ago, but that is not the case.  The three largest religions, and most politically impacting religions, are the religions that emerged from the biblical figure of Abram: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  Especially in the west, these religious ideologies heavily influence political decisions, political support (domestically and internationally), and individual prejudices.  It is vital to our children to understand these ideologies, and the actual proven history surrounding these ideologies, in order to understand the various groups within their communities and nation.  This is clearly the most difficult arena for rational thought because indoctrination and fear prevent people from rational thought.  Another cementing agent for religious indoctrination is when one is brought up under family religious indoctrination, no matter how irrational the ideology may be to an educated mind, it is extremely difficult for an adult to break the indoctrination of a parent, especially after the parents have died and passed on.  It is a flaw in the human element that creates iron deniability based on emotional pain which attaches itself to the blind reassurance of the religious ideology linking it with the memory of the lost parents that loved them and could never have been wrong.    I plan to break this category into multiple letters for my daughters in order to provide them with the findings I have compiled during my years of studies, my views after much critical thought on religion, my personal evolution and my hopes that along with their own studies and contemplation that they will advance further in understanding and action that I was able to during my lifetime.

Finally, understanding the political, economic and social composition of the government system in which they were born under, and their children will be born under, is considered essential to positive advancement and positive national advancement.  The history of our government may not be beautiful as it was once white-washed to us in public schools, but this is the soil and nation that our children will grow into adulthood under and birth their children under.  We need to teach our youth the economic caste and their positioning within the caste, and provide them with the intellectual and moral tools to advance that position.  Many Americans do not really begin to follow current political events and political policy-making, and how it impacts them, until they are middle age adults with families.  We need to ensure that our children understand the structure of American government and all the elements of it, from representative democracy to the corporate and foreign lobbyists that influence it, before adulthood.  It is vital for future American adults to be able to understand the previously discussed influences on human behavior when it comes to the representatives allowed to vote on their domestic and foreign policies, and hopefully it is an educational process and understanding that will allow more of our children to participate in the direction of this nation instead of allowing dual-citizenship politicians from the upper 10% of the economic caste, with their dual citizenships and questionable loyalties to bow at altars of corporate profits, foreign allegiances and individual greed.

In conclusion, I am not attempting to say that our children should not take time to enjoy their youth.  What I am suggesting is that the current encouragement for apathy, non-educational values and total disregard of important economic, political, historical and social issues is not a viable building platform for our American children.  There is an enough time each day to do both, allow our children to enjoy their youth while preparing them for the day that we are no longer here to guide and protect them.   This is my answer to the question that every parent asks themselves.  I would like to know your view on the question.