Stop Hitting Yourself

[Daveparts]

Any who grew up with an older sibling remembers the old gambit where they would grab your arm and force you to hit yourself while reciting, “Stop hitting yourself!” Later in life when I had grown up theoretically at least anyway, it was explained to me that. “The whole world is crazy except for you and me and sometimes I don’t know about you.” On the surface that appears to be just a superficial throw away line but it really does explain a lot about us as humans. We all see the same reality it is how we interpret that information that we then decide who is a genius and who is a madman and when we are being punched or when we are just hitting ourselves.

This of course is same as it ever was, this is not a revelation and no one will label me a prophet for revealing it. But this information was hard earned and paid for at high cost and you would think that in the course of human evolution it would have come to us much earlier. But this is a blind spot apparently an evolutionary doughnut hole! That to solve any human problem it is the correct scale that we use, for example the scientific method. Can you prove it? Can you document it and reproduce the same results again on demand?

In medieval France at the outbreak of the Black Death civic leaders met to determine the cause for the outbreak of the calamity. After an exhaustive study and research it was determined that Jews were the cause of the outbreak! And that the cure was simple and certain the Jews were rounded up and placed in the synagogue the door was nailed shut and the building set on fire, problem solved!

The politicians explained away any further outbreaks with, they must have had come into contact with Jews or were Jewish sympathizers or perhaps were secretly Jewish themselves. The solution was cruel and inhuman but even the medieval politician knew that a popular solution that probably wouldn’t work was better than an unpopular solution that might.

All over the planet we have built monuments to great politicians and philosophers and yet we still insist on using the wrong scale to weigh out problems. If I told you to add 42 to 61 you would quickly answer 103! But if I said incorrect, what is the fair answer? What is the coldest answer to the problem? What would the answer be during November? Why haven’t we as yet built a monument to the universal truth that all politicians use emotional solutions to benefit themselves regardless of how it affects society?

That politicians use emotional solutions the same way an arsonists uses gasoline. Not that emotional answers are always bad or wrong but the wisdom to know when to use which. Under a monarchy you get what you get sometimes wise sometimes foolish but when you have a representative government you throw gas on an emotional fire. Recently a New York state policeman was shot and killed by a suspect with the result that a state Senator demanded an immediate special session to bring back the death penalty despite the fact that the perpetrator was killed by police.

We have changed laws so that the murder of a pregnant women count as two murders does anyone rational think a murderer will wonder if his victim is pregnant or not or will ask, “Are you on birth control.” In baseball you cannot assume a double play in murder you can our President declares the doctrine of preemptive war under the doctrine of preemptive war the pitcher can tag out any base runners on a belief that it was their intention was to steal the next base. Not peace through strength but strength through war, war on the pretext of I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.

Now if you get drunk and get in an accident and kill some one that’s vehicular homicide if your sober and get in an accident and kill someone that was unavoidable tragedy. Stupid and sober is a valid excuse! If you invade a country on faulty information and kill 600,000 of it’s inhabitants plus thousands of your own remember stupid and sober is a valid excuse. If you had been drunk when you did that there’d be trouble mister!Why didn’t Bill Clinton think of that, “Yes it was stupid but hey I couldn’t help myself, I was sober!”

Somebody flew airplanes into skyscrapers so from now on until the end of time Americans must go through ever more intrusive searches just to board an airliner. I watched a man of eighty pulled from a line and made to put his hands up so they could run a metal detector around his body so we’ve gained nothing since medieval France.Some guys plotted to mix explosives on an airplane and without stopping to check if such a plot was even feasible or practical millions were inconvenienced. Grandmothers forced to trash their Efferdent and their Preparation H and children their Bubbleyum because some guys thought about doing something.

But any terrorist worth his salt knows he only needs to ship the bomb red label airfreight to achieve the desired result, as those packages aren’t opened. Every day we use emotional solutions that get further and further away from solving the problem. In Florida an insurance company denied an accident victims claim for an infusion pump to alleviate his chronic back pain. The man went to medicade and was again denied he was arrested a year later for dealing heroin, which he explained to the court he was using to treat his back pain and dealing to pay for it. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison but the good news is the state now pays for his infusion pump.

You could go on like this forever, in Montgomery Alabama police moved to confiscate the home of and 86 year old woman because her great grandson was dealing crack out of it while she was in the hospital. But Ken Lay convicted of looting Enron yet his assets are untouchable because he died before sentencing. From the war on terror to the war on drugs to the recent Virginia Tech tragedy the answer is always more laws and more restrictions to impair and inconvenience millions with the net affect of solving nothing.

The Virginia Tech tragedy has prompted politicians to call for arresting people who act strangely or write in a threatening manner. When will we stop hitting ourselves I would have Stephen King arrested immediately as well as most of the people in Hollywood just as they arrested the Lebanese professor for practicing writing English in the margin of his newspaper on an airliner. At one time we had judges to do the job of determining a fair sentence for the crime but now any judge that doesn’t had down the maximum will be beaten over the head with sound bites of being soft on crime, so we keep hitting ourselves.

We’ve built the perfect Catch 22 you fight crime with more laws and more laws make more criminals and you fight crime with more laws. Eventually we will all be incarcerated and there will be no one left outside to guard us in the jail. We will all be snared in a spider web of our own making hoisted on our own petards. The statue of justice wearing a blindfold to represent that justice was blind, freed from emotion or class using only the scales of justice to determine the correct path. Now however I think she wears it out of embarrassment, she’s afraid to look at where we’re going because we won’t stop hitting ourselves

[Demeter]

1. The First Step: Stop LYING to Ourselves, Our Children, and Our Neighbors

Then, stop the abuse of power. The rest is a consequence of these two.