What I am Focused On

It is my prevailing view that the tension in today's world is caused by pulling between two forces: the dispiriting shrinkage personal control people have and the growing resentment of being denied this entitlement.

These are opposites, so you would think that they naturally collide, but considering that America is the first true republic-- free of monarchy--, a country less than 250 years old, entitlement to personal control has never been a prevailing worldveiw. Not even during the beginnings of America, when democracy wasn't yet enacted.

Nowadays, people want to be in control of themselves, but they have been lied to by a system that isn't ready to give them that control. The system has led them to believe that radical individualization is the key to that control. The old school wants us to believe that everyone should focus on themselves and if you got yours then I should get mine. In this, we loose all control we have by ignoring why people migrate to cities in the first place: to work together.

By choosing to believe that we are best left to ignoring the needs of others, we loose all control of ourselves and our personal fields because of the chaos of no responsibility. No one feels that anyone is held accountable to anyone. No one can effect anything because everyone is thinking about sustaining themselves. This is pervasive in law enforcement, in government, in business, in banking, in marriage. This is the same reason men abandon their pregnant girlfriends as employers ignore the careers of their employees.

A man has been talking to me about crime. No, he has been talking to me about why he hates police, and I have been talking about crime. Police need to exist. Government needs to exist. But if we can't hold a government accountable, than it is bound to be corrupt. If there are only ten men on a police force and two abuse citizens, than we should be able to fire them and replace them with upstanding men from the neighborhood. On the opposite end are criminals. If in a neighborhood of 100 households, 5 are headed by drug dealers, pimps and mafia. The neighborhood should be able to kick them out. They work the same way, yet this man was mad at me. To him, if a police officer abuses his power, than he's a pig. If a man sells cocaine, he just needs help (because he was obviously only doing this to feed his starving family) and should be rehabilitated. Right.

Either way, a justice system that doesn't respond to real crime and a criminal base that infests the neighborhood have the same root cause, somewhere. My focus is to find that cause and hit its nerve, effecting both problems at the same time. If a person doesn't like the police, understandable, but that doesn't stop criminals from preying on the neighborhood. I spent an hour asking this man what he would do to have citizens deter crime, rehabilitate offenders and punish criminals without prison, when needed. He couldn't give me any answers because all he wanted to talk about was how much he hated police. Fine, than be the police and stop crime.

Do average citizens in crime-infested neighborhoods feel they can tell these people to leave? No! Is it easy? Is it possible? When people feel that the only way they can succeed is by ignoring each other, than they can't work together against people who certainly aren't so unorganized. Turn this on the cops, and you have citizens keeping police accountable for deterring crime in their cities. Can we fire off police as easily as this? Can we fire off cheifs and staff as easily as this? Do our opinions on rehabilitation and sentencing matter? They won't as long as we are so quiet about this as to think we only need to blast open when a dramatic case comes along.

If accountability amongst law enforcement and morality amongst citizens are both important, we must make mechanisms around their importance. They are systems that should already be in place. We need to put them in place. But before that, we need a serious amount of courage to take back the fact that we are all accountable for each other, or else, why live in a city at all?