I've been doing a lot of thinking today and I came to a realization, a truth if you will, about society.
You can't have a society without the dregs of society. There will always be street prostitution, there will always be drugs, there will always be criminals doing crimes whether the media reports is or not. Crime is not dictated by the media, a politician, a demagogue, a police officer, or the elderly.
You also cannot eradicate terrorism or evil or inconvenient truths. There will always be a percentage of us that do not comply with society at all. "They fell through the cracks, they never belonged, they were lost nearly from the start."
Society's problem and solution is always trying to fill the cracks with some concrete crackdown toughness. The War on Drugs. The War on Terrorism. Zero Tolerance. Three Strikes Your Out. The War on Evil. The War on Crime. Instead of "tough new cracking skulls" policies, society needs to show compassion and understanding but with a firm but not too firm grip on limiting the always present ills of society.
For an example of society implementing bludgeons to fill the crack... In every fucking speech George Bush makes he mentions some inane shit about eradicating "Extreme Islamists" or eradicating "terror in our time" or "destroying evil, wherever evil is." You cannot possibly do this. Ever. All of society, in all its power, and if in one moment we could combine our goodwill and address all of society's ills, we would fail.
Society having its dregs is a feature of society that will never see its end.
What kind of Utopian hell would we create in its absence?
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2 comments:
I agree that society will always have its dregs. ANd whole-heartedly agree, that Bush and his policies to "end" and "eradicate" terrorism is a fail from the begin.
I've asked from the start of the Iraq war, how can we possibly imagine winning a non-winnable war? People's ideals, regardless of how inane, insane or different than the folks in control, are always going to survive the persecution of others.
Granted, terrorists, for all their evilness, IMO should be sought out and dealt with, but that point leading to the U.S. being in Iraq, for all the wrong reasons, and should be looking for one particular terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.
But, I digress...
Yes, society should look for other ways to deal with the dregs, other than violently, but rather, understandably. In other words, instead of waiting for the dregs to rear their ugly head and then deal with them,... seek them out, beforehand, with compassionate eyes, with the understanding, as you point out, that they will never go away, and try to forge solutions to help them help themselves, before they force themselves unto others.
Our society, is no longer just, "my neighborhood" or "your country", our society is the globe, as we are citizens in a global society now, with global problems, and the whole world should start looking at all of us as one world instead of hundreds of separate countries.
One country, in this big world, can not exist independently. It's a different planet than it was 30 years ago, and hopefully, in another 30 years, or sooner, we start to witness actual solidarity among every citizen of planet Earth.
Peace!
Food for thought. Thanks, Frisbee. This is your best writing I've come across. Sorry for the late reply.
Hey, man, I like your shit too. It inspires me to be less political and more 'macro' with the world we live in. Peace back at ya.
This is my real name. I am not afraid of it.
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