A Lack of Humanity Is Endemic in Our Culture

Yesterday, I had two experiences that brought home a major problem of our culture … it’s inhumanity.  We tend to think of this as a corporate problem, for example the stories of insurance companies denying claims or corporations moving forward with toxic products that harm their employees and the environment.  It’s all about money, the bottom line, not about people.

But yesterday, the experience was more “up front and personal.”  When I was at the local supermarket, the deli manager did not look happy.  I usually banter with her so I asked her what was wrong.  She told me that management is not allowing her to take time off to get her brakes fixed.  And they need to get fixed.

The second experience was at a Mexican restaurant I frequent.  I said to the waitress, who is always there and very pleasant, that when I was there the last time neither she nor any of the usual staff was there.  She confided in me that the manager had put her on probation and cut her hours because she had had to take off from work because her son was in the hospital!

What is wrong with people?  This is not a situation where a corporation is dealing with someone who is anonymous, a number, where inhumanity is bad enough.  This is person to person, people who work together every day.  And still, the reaction of management is impersonal, inhumane.  The restaurant isn’t even a corporate setting.  

I’m sure that management’s response would be that they are judged by the numbers they produce.  So they have to be strict.  But this is not about being strict.  If someone has to take time off to get their brakes fixed, this is an emergency or will prevent one.  If a child is taken to the hospital and the mother feels she needs to be there, then don’t punish her.

I assume that both these individuals did not have any personal time left, if they even had any to begin with.  And I’m sure it’s an inconvenience for management to get someone else to cover their hours.  But there’s always someone looking for extra hours.  Or someone to shift around.

I have a suspicion that part of the reason for management’s reaction was that the requests were from hourly staff.  If someone salaried asked for time off for these purposes, my bet is that it would probably have been granted.  In today’s workplace, there is no respect for hourly staff; they are expendable.

The point of this post is that the inhumanity of our culture (see my various posts, for example, “Creating a Safer World for Our Children”) has seeped into all corners, even small, person-to-person settings.  People are infected by the bug of impersonality.  Their addiction to their screens and social media has made them oddly incapable of handling real live interactions; studies have shown this.  I would bet that 40-50 years ago, these two women would not have had this experience.

When Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson speaks about the need for more decency in our society, she has hit the nail on its head.  Unfortunately, having people see that need, let alone guiding them to the point where they are able to act on that need, is a lost cause for the mass of people.  They are a total captive of our culture.  The problem is not just Trump, it is our culture.

But as I always say, individuals have the ability to march to a different drummer.  They can build their own world of humanity regardless what is going on around them.  It takes great discipline and faith.  But it is possible.

Sex - Misused and Abused - A Different Perspective

The reader might well ask, what does sex have to do with preserving American values?  Well, for one thing, as we know from the #MeToo experience, the male craving for sex often impacts the independence and integrity of women.  Their freedom from such abuse should certainly be an American value.  

But also regarding the male, when an individual has a craving for anything, let alone sex, he is not free  He may be free in the political sense, but he is not free in the sense of being the master of himself. of being able to decide and do what is in his best interest.  The American value of freedom goes beyond the political.  Your ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness is not just impacted by external forces, it is greatly impacted by one’s own internal forces.

And while healthy committed relationships or marriages may not be an American value as such, it is certainly something which society says it wants to foster.  And should.  It is critical that future generations of Americans be raised in supportive families, free of neurotic dynamics.  Free of the craving for “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”  We must cleanse ourselves of the scourge of addiction.

Here is the case against sex as we know it.  The lust for sex is a huge force in directing man’s actions.  Second only to the craving for money and power.   As such, it is a major source of stress, it comes between people as much as it binds them together, and it is an antagonist to spirituality.  It has ruined relationships.  It has ruined more than one political career, and in the #MeToo generation, it has brought many powerful people in different sectors of our culture low. 

Sex is a function critical to the survival of almost all species of life on Earth.  How then has sex become such a negative factor for man?  

With the exception of man, evolution has developed the function of sex to be discreet in its purpose and limited and particular as to its timing.  It’s purpose is procreation and survival of the fittest; Whether one looks at plants, fish, or even man’s closest animal relative - the apes - this is the limited function of sex.  And it can only occur during finite periods of time.

For man, however, sex has become something very different.  How did that come to be?  While women have been found to be more “lusty” during their fertile days, women, contrary to females of all other species, are “available” for sex throughout the year.  

And since males of most mammal species are horny beasts (we’ve all experienced a dog arousing himself on someone’s leg), the human male certainly takes advantage of that, even when procreation is unlikely.  Why?  Because we derive pleasure and other satisfaction from the sex act.  

That men and even women derive pleasure from sex is hardly a new phenomenon.  But in our contemporary culture, pleasure has become the primary purpose of sex … consistent with the pleasure syndrome which predominates our culture.  It also serves various psychological needs as noted below.  Procreation is now only a tangential function since through the use of various means of contraception, sex typically only results in pregnancy when you want it to, which is rarely.

The result is that sex is now one of the leading problems in relationships.  Basically said, if men especially aren’t finding sex pleasurable anymore, they either look elsewhere for that satisfaction and/or it becomes one of several factors that leads to a failed relationship and divorce. 

A related problem is that if a couple does have good sex, that gets confused, especially in the early stages of a relationship, with feeling they are in love or loved.  And that just isn’t the case.  It just means they have good sex.  Lust does not equal love.  But nevertheless couples get married based to a large extent on whether they have a good sex life because modern man does not know what love really is.  Feeling loved is thus dependent on having good sex.  When that’s gone, we want to move on.

The other ways in which sex is used in relationships to meet psychological needs are also not conducive to a healthy attitude towards sex and relationships.  For men especially, but also for women, the use or withholding of sex is an expression of power in a relationship where otherwise one may feel inadequate or weak.   When there are problems in a relationship, using sex to patch things up puts a burden on sex and rarely works for more than a limited time.  And for people who are unhappy with their work or other aspects of their life, the pleasure or release of sex is a respite, a distraction.  For all these reasons, the general attitude is that good sex is an essential part of a healthy relationship. 

Using sex primarily as a source of gratification, power, or bonding makes sex a source of major stress for man and is harmful to relationships.  Sex is used in the search for something which is essentially a fleeting illusion.  At the same time, its role in the procreation process is mostly negative, in that  most of the time people want to make sure that pregnancy does not result from sex.

How to improve the stability and nourishing nature of marriage and other committed relationships?  The answer is to base relationships on true love (more on that below), return sex to its primary purpose of procreation, and realize that there are other, more stable ways to establish a loving, intimate bond with a spouse/partner that do not involve the sex act.  “What?!”  the reader will undoubtedly exclaim.  “How absurd.”  

That is the ego-mind reacting.  Bear with me while I explain.  There is great comfort, satisfaction, and intimacy to be had within a loving relationship from hugging and various types of non-sexual touching … not as foreplay to sex, but just for the warmth and intimacy it engenders.  

I speak from experience.  I am in a deeply-loving, long-term relationship with my partner who is my best friend.  We are family.  We do not have sex.  But we do have a very physical relationship.  I feel more loved and more secure than in any relationship I have ever had.  I should note that we are totally committed to our relationship and are not looking for sex elsewhere because we have all the love we need and understand that to be happy sex cannot be used as a source of pleasure.

I know this will sound crazy to most readers, whether straight or gay, but that is the truth.  Sex has become so deeply engrained in our ego-drives, our self-image, that we cannot imagine life or a relationship without it; it is a craving.  But as with all other cravings, that is just a product of the ego-mind.  Yes, sex has a biological function.  But what man has turned sex into has little to do with that function.

NOTE:  The often-held belief that ejaculation is essential for a man’s health is just not true.  There is no clear evidence of a health benefit to ejaculating or risk from not ejaculating.  There is some very weak evidence that frequent ejaculation may help prevent prostate cancer, but that’s all it is.  Arousal, however, does release certain chemicals which increase feelings of wellbeing.  But those same chemicals are released by hugging and other types of touching connected with sincere affection.

For gays and lesbians, this would mean that while their relationships would be very physical and loving, sex would not be part of the relationship.  To be blunt, orgasm would not be part of their relationship or their lives.  As for their raising a family, having a sex-less relationship will obviously not impact that since sex was never part of that for them anyway; gays and lesbians have found methods to have biologically-related children without engaging in procreative sex,.

What about teenagers and older uncommitted individuals?  For them, sex would no longer be part of the right of passage into adulthood or a means of satisfying oneself or coarsely expressing oneself or having the pleasure of someone’s company by hooking up.  These are measures, often desperate, that people take to fill an emptiness in their lives.  We must instead raise children so there is no emptiness that needs to be filled.  (See my book, Raising a Happy Child.)

I am not underestimating the huge change this would entail for most people.  The initial gap in their lives.  Again people would have to be taught that there are other forms of physical interaction which are very satisfying and far less problematic.  People will have to be taught to have a different relationship with themselves.

With sex returned to its biologically-intended purpose … procreation, sex will then regain real meaning and be a source of growth and maturity.   Both male and female will be making a statement, a real commitment to the future, when they have procreative sex.  The ecstasy of sex will be connected with the desire to create a family, not satisfying some ego-desire for a high.

But there is another real kicker in my proposal … most people have no clue as to what true love is.  Yet this must form the basis of the new relationship.  

This is unfortunately not something we typically learn through our experience … not from our parents, movies, or any aspect of our culture.  Since love not sex will be the cornerstone of a relationship, this means that couples will need to learn what love really means and how to develop it between two people.   

Simply said, love develops from mutual feelings of trust, respect, caring, and thoughtfulness.  One will have to be taught this or learn it from a book since it is not part of our culture.  Shedding the cultural connection between sex and love will be difficult.  But these mutual feelings I listed are the sine qua non of a loving, lasting, relationship.  Of course issues of character and interest compatibility also play an important role in a relationship’s longevity.

I should say that I do not mean to imply that there are no lasting relationships based on true love that have sex as an integral part of the relationship, not just used for procreation.  What I’m saying is that our current attitude towards sex is for the most part destructive both to the individual and to relationships.  And so the dynamic needs to change.

The benefits of this change to both the individual and society would be significant.  For individuals, couples and their children it would bring an increased feeling of security and peace, which would in turn substantially change the dynamics within a typical family, benefiting the psyches of all.  For society it would mean a decrease in both illegitimate and unwanted pregnancies/births, a substantial decrease in the divorce rate, a decrease in all forms of spousal and child abuse, both physical and psychological, and a substantial decrease if not elimination of sex addiction.  Just for starters.  Spiritually, it would enable man to overcome a major barrier to being a master of himself.

While my proposal will sound absurd and futuristic to many, the argument that a marriage or other committed relationship should be based on true love rather than sex/lust, and that sex is actually detrimental to a relationship is not a new thought.  To my surprise, although I shouldn’t have been since Montaigne is always wise and amazingly pertinent, I discovered that the French 16th century philosopher/essayist had the following to say, after I began writing this post:

 “I see no marriages that sooner are troubled and fail than those that progress by means of beauty and amorous desires.  It needs more solid and stable foundations, and we need to go at it more circumspectly; this ebullient ardor is no good for it.”  

“A good marriage rejects the company and conditions of sex.  It tries to reproduce those of friendship.  It is a sweet association of life, full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.”

It is unfortunately impossible to imagine such a change happening on a society-wide basis.  It would require a major change in the way many aspects of our culture operate, the experiences people have as they are growing up.  

But we as individuals have the ability to make these changes on our own, to listen to a different drummer, regardless what is going on around us.  It “just” requires making a commitment first to oneself and then finding another compatible soul to enter this journey.  This is something that is within your power to do.  Think about it!

This post is dedicated to my partner to whom this concept of sex was revealed recently and who shared it with me.

My Takeaway from the Mueller Testimony

The New York Times and other major media depicted Mueller’s testimony as being a loss for the Democrats.  Nothing new was revealed, no existing facts were heightened or sensationalized.  It was nothing more than a regurgitation of the Report.  Certainly nothing happened that caused any Republicans in Congress to give second thoughts about whether to stand behind Trump.

However, when Mueller was asked in his morning appearance whether he didn’t indict Trump because of the standing Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he responded, “That is correct.”  When a Republican representative followed up to clarify, he confirmed what he had just said.

But in his opening statement for his afternoon appearance, he backtracked and said that opinion kept them from even considering whether Trump had committed a crime.  That revised statement was a disappointment for the Democrats.

But wait, something doesn’t make sense.  Mueller did find that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to sustain a charge regarding collusion with the Russians.  So while he couldn’t indict, he could exonerate.  The fact that he didn’t do the same on the obstruction charge leads to the inescapable conclusion that he felt Trump committed obstruction, as he indicated in his morning testimony.  But no one asked that question.

Since it now is clear that the Special Counsel felt he could not determine whether Trump had engaged in an obstruction of justice, but just laid out the facts, it is up to the House to determine whether he engaged in obstruction and thus engaged in an impeachable offense.

The Democratic Platform for 2020?

I have argued for years that Democrats need to have a cohesive positive vision for America that speaks to the average American, and policies that flow from it (see my book, We Still Hold These Truths, and my post “The Perennial Search for the Democrats’ Mission”).  Never has that been more important than for the 2020 election.  

We have a mad President to whom roughly a third of the voting electorate is in thrall.  In typical populist style, he has whipped them to a frenzy.  The rest of the electorate is not in thrall and indeed rather disgusted by the President.  

This is an opening for Democrats.  The key to winning is getting the uncommitted people who normally vote, and who voted for Trump in 2016, to vote for the Democrat in 2020.

But If activist progressives have their way, that opening will be squandered and Trump will win another term.  Some of their ideas are just off the wall.  Others have merit but the way they are expressed and their attitude towards those who oppose them creates ill will among a far larger group of people than those they appeal to. 

They have no nuance; no willingness to compromise.  They have no understanding what leadership involves.  Because they won their seats, they think they have a mandate; they don’t understand that the rest of the country may feel very differently.

For example, while most people would like better and cheaper health insurance, most are by and large happy with their current employer-provided insurance.  They need to be convinced and allowed to choose Medicare For All, not be forced into it by eliminating private insurance off the bat.  That scares them and creates a feeling of insecurity.  Let’s get back to the initial goal of making all Americans health care secure by providing access to those who don’t have it now.  Medicare For All should initially be an option for all.

Most people want to treat immigrants and asylum seekers fairly.  On the other hand, regardless our history as a nation of immigrants, many feel that things are different now than in the 19th and early 20th century.  We cannot have open doors.  And so the idea of decriminalizing illegal entry seems wrong-headed.  And providing health care by right to all illegal immigrants would not only encourage illegal immigration, millions of our own citizens don’t have that access.  

The progressive immigration reform agenda used to be to provide a pathway to citizenship for the illegal immigrants already here and who are part of our society and economy.  That people could understand and support, depending on the details. But that goal seems lost in the current debate.

The first Democratic debate does not bode well for winning over the uncommitted group in the middle.  Despite activist progressives representing only a small fraction of the Democratic voting base, their strong presence on social media and the Squad’s in-your-face press conferences, led most of the candidates to voice positions or raise their hands in solidarity with the activists but striking fear into the rest of us who worry about another 4 years of Trump. 

I consider myself a progressive and have argued in these pages for major changes in the relationship between government, business, and the people.  But these changes must be approached incrementally; otherwise there will be no mandate for those changes.   We need a progressive candidate who is reasonable, not strident; who will appeal to the Democratic base and beyond. 

A.O.C. and Rep. Omar scare me.  That they bring a smile to Trump’s face scares me even more.

The Need to Transform the Health Care System

There is much conversation, at least among Democrats, about the need to change the health care system from one which is based on private insurers to one which is a single payer government system …Medicare For All.  But what that would look like and how we get there is not the topic of this post.

The reform that is addressed by this post is the transformation of the health care industry, and it is an industry, from a for-profit model to a non-profit model. The model would still be capitalist, private-owned.  This is not socialism.

Why is this transformation critical, separate and apart from the need to provide universal coverage through a government insurance system.

1.  Drug/therapy development/production is currently constricted.   Under the current system, pharmaceutical companies have no interest in exploring drugs to treat illness unless they would provide, if successful, a financial bonanza.  Corporations not only have to make money, they have to keep on increasing their profits in order to please investors.

They thus have no financial incentive to test whether an existing drug, certainly one that is available as a generic, can effectively treat an illness.  They also have no interest in producing a drug if they don’t make enough profit from it.

This problem has resulted in a serious shortage of drugs to treat a broad range of illnesses.  And the development of new drugs/approaches that are extremely expensive.  It has also led to marketing ploys to increase use and thus profits.

2.  The capitalist approach is not appropriate.  When it comes to making decisions that impact an individual’s or the nation’s health, whether it regards insurance coverage of a procedure or drug research, the profit motive is not appropriate.  It should not be part of the decision process.

Now it must be truthfully acknowledged that even in a nonprofit atmosphere or with government insurance, there will be a need to take account of the cost of a procedure or a drug.  Because the availability of money is not infinite.

But the decision will be made not on the basis of it’s impact on a company’s profit, but rather whether looking at the good of all it is the best use of resources.  For  example, under the current system, the last days/weeks of life are the most expensive medically and yet they give no hope of recovery; they merely postpone, often with suffering, the inevitable end.  Many will object to what is viewed as "rationing" health care, but is this the right or even compassionate use of resources?

3.  Competition is wasteful.   Since most hospital centers are for-profit institutions, they compete with each other for business just like all other corporations.  As a result each hospital feels the need to have the latest technology across a broad range of fields.  This is a very inefficient use of very expensive technology and drives up our health care costs.

The model instead should be one of regional planning, with all hospitals having a core competence but specialization and the expensive technology that supports it being divided up among the region’s hospitals.  While that would not provide the greatest convenience for the patient, it would provide significant cost benefits for the system and thus for the patient/consumer who is ultimately paying for the system either through insurance or taxes.

For these reasons, the law should be changed so that any business involved in the health care system … insurance companies, hospitals, doctors offices, pharmaceutical companies … should be required to be organized on a nonprofit basis.

Trump As Antichrist

An Antichrist is someone who is an antagonist of Christ, someone who is an adversary of Christ.  What does that mean?  It means someone who works against everything that Christ taught and valued.  It means someone who routinely does the opposite of what Jesus would do.

The core of any religion is its teaching on how to live life, on how to interact with yourself and those around you.  This is usually termed its ethical or moral code.  And in Christianity, “the moral standards for human beings flow from God’s moral character."  God/Christ “commands us to love, to be merciful, and to not bear false witness.” 

Let us examine President Trump by these moral standards.  

1.  Does Trump love his fellow man?  The only people Trump loves, and that is using the term very loosely. are those who do what he wants them to do.  Anyone who opposes him or displeases him are vilified in his tweets and other public pronouncements.  Trump loves no one but himself.  But he is not the garden-variety narcissist that we all know; he is instead someone with Narcissist Personality Disorder as defined by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM Manual.  He is an evil person.

2.  Is Trump merciful?  No.  This is most evident in his actions and pronouncements regarding illegal immigrants from Mexico.  The issue is not that he regards their presence as being illegal - that’s the law - it is that he vilifies them and treats them as dirt.  Regarding those seeking asylum from the violence in their Central American homelands, he makes no distinction between their status and those of illegal immigrants.  Not only is he confused about the law, he is not merciful.  Regarding the LGBT community he has attempted to rollback protections afforded by Federal regulations causing much suffering.  The examples are endless.  And if you are a perceived enemy or antagonist of his, he certainly shows no mercy in his blistering attacks.

Unlike Christ, he has not opened his heart to those who are despised by our society, the contemporary equivalent of lepers and prostitutes in Christ’s time.  Instead, he has inflamed his bases’ intolerance towards them for one reason only - to manipulate them and be secure in their unwavering support of him.

3.  Does Trump lie?  Is the Pope Catholic?!  The answer is a resounding, yes.  All Presidents have lied to protect themselves on occasion.  Trump, however lies many times every day.  He is a pathological lier.  Ironically, what he calls “Fake News” is telling the truth and his version of the news is instead fake.  But by branding various media as Fake News, he has cleverly set himself up as being the truthful one.

Let’s look at this another way.  The seven deadly sins of Christianity are pride, greed. lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.  Many if not most people are to some extent guilty of these sins.  But Trump is guilty of them in spades; indeed, these sins define him.  I don’t think it’s necessary to offer any proof that he is guilty every day of all seven deadly sins.

To me though the most disturbing aspect of Donald Trump's spiritual immorality is that he has no conscience, he has no concern for his fellow man, he certainly doesn’t “do unto others as he would have them do unto him.”  He uses everyone around him and his supporters shamelessly to advance his only goal … which is his own power and reputation.  He is a con man par excellence.  

As such, Donald Trump is in his everyday actions an Antichrist.  Not only is everything he stands for and does antagonistic to the human values that Christ put at the center of his moral code, but as President, the leader of this country, he inflames large segments of the population to follow his example, rather than adopting a Christian moral position regarding the problems we are facing and those less fortunate among us, who suffer from discrimination and bigotry.

Asylum v Illegal Immigration - The Truth Must Be Told

I read a fact recently that I have not seen reported anywhere before that would have a huge impact on the discussion of Trump’s actions regarding those trying to enter the U.S. from our southern border

In the past, virtually all those crossing the border illegally were single men from Mexico looking for jobs in the U.S.   That flow of illegal immigration has virtually ceased.  Whereas it accounted for 98% (1.6 million apprehensions) in 2000, it 2014 they accounted for only 186,000 arrests.  The drop has been largely the result of a more stable Mexican economy and a declining Mexican birthrate.

But since 2010, the number of women with children, or single children, from Central America who are seeking asylum in the U.S. from the violence in their home countries has been increasing and now account for the majority of those attempting to cross the border.  Typically, they present themselves for asylum at the border, rather than attempt to cross undetected illegally.

To Trump, there is no difference between the two groups.  They are all dangerous scabs to be kept out of the U.S.  Yet to any sane, reasonable person there is a huge difference.  Women and children, or complete families, seeking asylum from the terrible violence in the Central American countries fit into a traditional category of people seeking to immigrate to the U.S. without a visa.  And they should be treated accordingly.

Even the single men who crossed the border illegally from Mexico did not fit Trump’s xenophobic description of dangerous men.  They have since immigrating taken their place in the American workplace, taking low-paying, menial jobs that Americans have no interest in but are of vital importance to the functioning of our economy.  And mostly they are paying the appropriate taxes.

Immigrant supporters and Democrats in Congress need to clarify for the American public the nature of people coming into the country today from the south.  Americans are still primarily good-hearted people.  When they learn the truth, as was the case with the separation of children from their families, and most recently with the report of the deplorable conditions children were subjected to, their attitude towards these women and children will change and Trump will be force to change the government’s anti-immigrant policies.