Closing The Divide, 9

Democracy came to us too early in our human development. We are like young teenagers, we don't want to be governed by anyone, we want to be independent and to do whatever the hell we want, but we don't have the maturity nor the skills to negotiate life as responsible and independent adults. Our democracy is very much an extension of adolescent rage, with a huge emphasis put on individual rights, and very little given to communitarian responsibilities and obligations. This is the major flaw to our democratic process. We are for the most part too selfish, too egoistic and too tunnel-visioned to be trusted with a jewel so precious and wonderful as democracy. The one problem with my argument is, in agreement with Sir Winston Churchill, all the alternatives are worse. So we have home-owners, all of them taking full advantage of their democratic rights and freedoms, working hard for the Man and saving up for that dream home, and slaving away at their often thankless occupations for up to three decades, in hock to the banks until they can have that long coveted mortgage burning party, just in time for a few good final years left before Old Mortality begins to wreak its vengeance. Those same home owners, for the most part, were born and raised after the Second World War, growing up short on ethics or any developed sense of communitarian responsibility and quite long on personal ambition and greed. They have done more damage, by default of being formed with a water-tight moral and ethical training, to our social fabric than almost anyone else. And all because they were never properly influenced or conditioned as children that the collective good should be at least as important, and sometimes even more so, than their own personal gratification and ambition. Now we are quite stuck with the bitter fruit of that ethical vacuum and the best we can do for now will be damage control. I just listened on the CBC to a rather ridiculous rant on the program "Out In The Open" from a black Jamaican woman who has decided to homeschool her kids in order to protect them from "Whiteness." Here is a splendid example of what is wrong with our education system. Rather than providing a structure where children can learn to be colour blind concerning race and to reach across cultural and ethnic barriers for a better future, we still have those same problems repeating like a badly made Ruben sandwich. This woman's children were subjected to racist taunts in their school. Being herself likely traumatized from her own experience of institutional racism, she cannot be expected to respond rationally, hence her reaction: lashing back in anger and meeting white racism with black racism. Her children are likely going to absorb their mother's hate and fear of white people, and they are going to be in danger of going through life living in fear, distrust and trauma. Our schools, contrary to the Jamaican woman's claim, need badly to be reformed for one simple reason: that is where the majority of children are educated and conditioned. I wonder what would happen if our education system began to give equal importance to social, ethical and humanitarian development, as is already given to the development of cognitive skills and the learning and absorption of facts. I would like to see representatives of all religions: all forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Baha'i, and other faiths play a major role in the education and formation of children: not to proselytize, nor convert, but to inform on ethics and morality. I would like to see field trips and exercises for children beginning from grade one, where they are increasingly encouraged to connect with others in the community, perform volunteer work, and learn the value of caring for and helping others. All of these things and more are of far greater value than learning skills that will make them good and compliant little workers. At the other end of the spectrum, I would also like to see four years added to the arc of compulsory education, where students have to learn and acquire the equivalent of degrees in the liberal arts and humanities. We need a society made up of people, where all members are equally literate in ethics, humanism, and communitarian values, and there has to be a concerted resistance against this current culture of greed and selfishness if we are going to begin to really move forward as a species. Back to home owners: I wonder what would happen if everyone had the means of owning their own home, regardless of income or wealth? Gentle Reader, something needs to be done to challenge, undermine and replace this ethos of social Darwinism that is leading us to our own collective destruction. even the relatively innocuous selfishness of your average home owner is going to be problematic, until we really start to see beyond our self-interest and to learn to work and live together in a way that moves us all forward, with no cracks left for people to fall through.