Month: October 2021

Without workers no work is done. There needs to be a reassessment of the value of the work that provides the products that create wealth. Business people who set up the mechanism of exchange and commerce, businesses, provide an essential and important central feature of commerce, the market. But their role is not more important than, nor does it have more value than the role of the people who actually do the physical work. The disproportionally large share of wealth that goes to business people and shareholders who do NOT do the physical work as compared to the far smaller share of the weath that goes to the workers is not just. There needs to be a reassessment of the distribution of wealth and a more equitable balance of the distribution of wealth should be achieved. At a minimum every human being has basic needs that must be met: housing, food, clean air and water, toilet facilities, clothes, health care, (preferably preventative and maintenance of good health as opposed to intensive, expensive acute care for advanced diseases), and education. These basic human needs are universal and they should be considered essential for all people. That is the only way to have an economically just society. There should be measures that could be used to modify or remove some of the things that create this huge income inequality that we have ended up with. CEO compensation, tax cuts, loopholes, tax havens, waivers and exemptions and a tax code that favor the rich, the supercharged power and influence over Congress and the the government that lobbying and dark money of billionaires has, the rapacious and predatory elements of capitalism, all of these are factors that contribute to social and economic inequality and wealth disparity not just here in the United States but globally. It’s a very involved, complex problem comprised of a multitude of issues. There are really no easy fixes. But the bare minimum should be that all people are paid sufficiently enough money for the work that they do for them to be able to provide for their basic needs and those of their families, without having to sacrifice having any of those basic needs being met.

To avoid the confrontations and struggles that often occur between business/management and workers, it would be really exciting and liberating and ultimately infinitely more satisfying if more Americans were to start their own employee-owned businesses and cooperatives and bypass altogether the larger, richer, and often heavy-handed and wrongfully, selfishly demanding big businesses that treat workers like shit. Americans could, and should, start building and growing their own local businesses and do themselves the big favor of controlling their own businesses and taking control over their own interests. It would free them up from being controlled by people who don’t work. The two greatest things about employee-owned businesses is that they can be set up any way that the owners, the workers themselves, want and agree to together as a group, but also that they are more economically just and fair with fairer pay and less economic inequality between the various jobs in the organization and the management, since it is composed of the worker employee owners of the businesses. They can set up the business so that all employees, management AND workers, all have nearly the same economic equity and earn salaries that are closer together and where everyone makes a good wage and all have the same benefits. This kind of a metamorphosis of the economy and the way that Americans live their lives would be very good for economy. We could definitely use more businesses like this.

One can believe in God (Faith), or not. Whatever God is in the minds of those who believe in him, how can they know God. God is everywhere. But “He” is unknowable. (For those who refer to him as He or Father or by any other male identifier, does that mean that God has male genitalia? Does the God of the entire universe, of all universes have the male sex organs between his two legs?) For as long as human beings have been talking about God, not a single person has ever proved the existence of God in any empirical or physical sense except for ascribing the nature and wonder of the universe to him/it, which is fine. But those are material physical things that we know have and can know because they are right here on our own planet and we know that they exist because they came to us through evolution of life on Earth. But even that doesn’t prove God’s existence. How can anyone know a thing, God, that as is always stated by “religious” people as being omniscient, omnipresent, omni EVERYTHING and ruler of the entire universe, exists without any concrete proof of it? Without any direct connection or direct communication with it? And how can the human mind, even if such a thing as God existed, actually fathom, know, or understand something as phenomenally vast that it controls all of our universe, which we as of yet only very partially know and understand, and if there are any other universes God probably controls them too, ever be able to comprehend such an entity of such vast scale? Even the most brilliant minds that have ever existed could never do it and it’s likely that no brilliant mind of the future could ever really know what God is if something like God exists, let alone have an intimate relationship with “him”. The human mind is amazing. But it’s just not THAT amazing.

Jesus was a traveler. He was a world citizen. He was a universalist because he saw all of humanity as one. He was teacher. He had no material wealth. He was humble. He lived, traveled, and worked hand to mouth, depending on the kindness of friends, people who loved him, and total strangers. Jesus was a teacher. His message, the very essence of his teachings was love. How to love. How to grow love. And how to use love to change the world, to make it a better place. Jesus tried to teach us how to create heaven on Earth. Buddha taught the world how to work through suffering to achieve nirvana and much of it had to do with love which is what attracted Jesus to study Buddha’s message and to combine Buddha’s wisdom and insights into his own. I don’t think of Jesus as being defiant as much as a person who simply chose to do what is right instead of going along with the norm. I don’t think of him as being an anarchist. He simply did the right things by living his life the way he did it. His life was a model for how to be, for how to live, for how to be true to self but also how to be a citizen of the larger community and the world and for how to help the community become inclusive, loving, and caring, nurturing, self sustaining, and thriving. That is how Jesus was non compliant and why he was a threat to not just his own ethnic community but to all religious orthodoxies that veered from the very simple path that is moral and religious in the deepest sense and not at all publicly flashy and ostentatious or collective in the sense of being patriarchal or hierarchical in any way at all.