01-15-2009, 07:36 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Jon
You can try to blame the government, the economy, society or whatever you think you can rationalize, but it comes down to one thing, someone has so little respect for the rights, property and feelings of others that they would kick in a door just to see if there was something they wanted to steal.
Rob, I don't see how getting involve in the community will help stop these kinds of things, unless you are willing to put yourself in harm's way and confront the perpetrators, and from what I have seen you have very few people around here that are.
When more people get involved in their communities, there is more opportunity for mutual understanding, and most importantly for changing the culture we currently have that is just about guaranteed to generate people who steal and do other nasty things.
This problem is not about the few people who steal and do other nasty things. It will never be solved by locking them up, or by getting more guns than them, or more cops, or by putting up gates and fences to keep them out. In fact that will make it worse - always has - because there is no 'them'.
It's all us, and as long as we each continue to play our part in our long history exploitation of the many by the few, of injustice, divide-and-conquer, corruption in government and business, cultural repression and genocide, and so on, we keep teaching that these things are OK. If it's OK for some of us to do mean nasty things to our fellow humans that are "legal," there will always be some of use that figure it ought to also be OK to do mean nasty things that happen to be "illegal."
We all play our part in this scenario. Our historical mistake is always thinking that there is someone else to blame for our part. And not noticing that our very culture is just about guaranteed to generate people who steal and do other nasty things.
This is not an excuse for stealing and doing other nasty things. It is a suggestion that any us/them approach can only make the situation worse and that lack of true community is a fundamental piece of the problem.
hi ho,
John S.