Saving the world in 5 easy steps (part 1):

Let’s face it: the world is totally screwed up, and on the verge of total chaos. Take a look at almost any country in the world, and something is happening due to greed and selfishness. It is too easy to watch the news, shrug and think, I can’t do anything about it. But that is not totally true. There is a lot of validity to the saying everybody is either part of the problem or part of the solution.

That being so, I would like to make some suggestions on how to improve the world while there is still a chance–if indeed, it is not too late already. I could write an entire thesis on how to go about this; in fact, a decade ago I began doing such a thesis, entitled A Manifesto for the New Millennium. I had gotten 6,000 words into it when the world trade towers collapsed, and I decided there was no more hope for humanity in this new millennium than there was in the previous one, so I stopped writing it.

But ten years have passed, and perhaps it is time to make another try. I’ve decided to skip the long-winded thesis though, since who would read it? We live in the age of tweeting and text messaging, where people want short sound bites they can read quickly and easily. So I have decided to save the world in two parts. Part One will consist of reasons the world is screwed up. Part Two will consists of ways to repair those problems. Each part will consist of 5 steps.

5 reasons the world is screwed up:

1. People are primarily self-absorbed and concerned only with their own interests.
2. Governments are primarily concerned with maintaining power at all costs.
3. Power corrupts.
4. People are bigoted against those who are different than themselves.
5. People are hypocritical.

Let’s discuss the first three: Not only do most people ignore concerns of other people, but they are so fixated on satisfying their own wants that, if doing so specifically hurts other people, so be it. Bruce Springsteen described it in a very pithy, but effective way: Poor man wants to be rich; rich man wants to be king; and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything.

So we have politicians whose only concern is being re-elected. They concentrate exclusively on satisfying their own constituency with little, or no, regard for the rest of the populace. Why else would the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives refuse to extend unemployment unless rich people get a tax cut? Which is more important, that the unemployed pay their bills or that rich people have a few extra pennies in their pocket?

Do you realize that many laws being passed by the US Congress specifically exempts members of congress from those laws?

The situation is worse when the ruler of a country has a rigged system where his/her power is guaranteed for life. Can anybody think of a single moral reason why Egypt’s Mubarak refuses to resign as dictator/president of Egypt when his entire country is in chaos because of him?

Non-politicians are no better. How many leaders of major corporations take exorbitant salaries and compensations while firing employees to cut costs? Big oil corporations pay virtually no federal taxes, yet illegally fix gasoline prices while making record profits. What about the people who bankrupt their companies, costing their employees jobs and pensions, while reaping outrageous profits themselves. Do you remember Neil Bush who orchestrated a major bank failure to reap a financial windfall while his father George H.W. Bush was president, and amazingly the federal government hushed it up instead of investigating it?

And what about common citizens who are so obsessed with lowering their taxes that they do not care who suffers as a result? New Jersey is a prime example of this. For over a decade, the state legislature (which was Democrat-controlled) refused to make their legally-required annual payments into police / firefighters / state employees / teachers’ pension funds, instead using the money for property tax rebates under the belief that without those rebates they would not be re-elected. Now those pensions funds are in serious jeopardy, so the governor (a Republican–this is a bipartisan screwing) wants to cut back on pension benefits due to the pension funds’ dire straits, while still refusing to make the state’s legally-required annual payments! And how does the average resident of New Jersey feel about this? Most people I talk to who have no family members affected by the state pension funds believe that (a) all state workers, police, fire fighters and teachers should voluntarily agree to be screwed, and (b) state residents earning over $300,000 per year should have their taxes reduced rather than help make the fund solvent. Another example of the rich people keeping a bit of pocket change being more important than the average workers making a decent living.

And we won’t even discuss how badly the governor is destroying public education while trying to funnel state money into private schools which–surprisingly–his children attend.

I know several people who claim to be strict Catholics, yet refuse to follow any of Christ’s teachings about tolerance and rich vs poor. How easily they ignore Christ’s parable about how It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The fourth and fifth reasons are obvious. Whichever wars in the world are not due to greed are due to intolerance. Remember Northern Irish Catholics battling with Northern Irish Protestants? The genocide in former Yugoslavia? Rwanda? Moslems fighting with Jews? Christians fighting with Moslems? Isn’t it sad that all religions preach peace and tolerance, yet people who claim to be staunchly religious are intolerant of other groups to the point of trying to kill them?

And while the United States tries to portray itself to the rest of the world as a beacon of tolerance, that is purely a sham. This country has a history of black slavery and genocide of Native Americans. Even today it is filled with whites who hate blacks, Christians who hate Moslems, ethnic groups belittling other ethnic groups. As a very minor example, I turned off the radio in annoyance this morning as a local deejay was speaking in mock insulting Italian-American dialect for ten minutes. How the hell could anybody think that is amusing?

And don’t even get me started about the Tea Party. Under the pretense of wanting to rein in runaway government, they are proponents of elitism and “me-first” in its worst forms.

If America truly wants to set a shining example for the rest of the world, then we need to get our own house in order first. Next time I will try to propose 5 ways that individuals can start to make a difference.