Why Are We Afraid of AI?

 

Why are we afraid of AI (artificial intelligence)? AI is a tool that we have created, for the purpose of serving our needs, and therefore it would seem that it should be good for us, should enable us to accomplish something that we currently cannot do.

The problem is that AI is going to enable an even greater surveillance over every aspect of our lives, and apparently make decisions based on the information it gathers, in accordance with the law. Is it so scary that we should become a nation that follows the law?

A human has capacities that AI does not have, and should AI develop some of these higher qualities then there should not be an issue. The question becomes, do we have confidence that we are still going to be able to live according to our higher qualities, or do we seem to feel AI is going to dominate?

And when we look at it from this perspective, we seem to be right to worry, because we see people’s lives all around us being destroyed by the unfeeling, mechanical application of the law, both administrative and criminal. If we’ve already lost the capacity of human judgment, the capacity to consider people’s motivations, needs and history, then there can be little expectation that AI will exceed us in this respect. There can be no justice without heart, and humans are the ones with the heart.

Not only do we see a criminal justice system that regularly sentences juvenile offenders to life in prison, handing down similarly highly excessive sentences to all as a matter of course, but we see our social safety networks cutting off the indigent and the poor due to bureaucratic realities, with no recognition of their actual need. We see insurance companies freely refusing care to those who may well die without the necessary treatments, in order to make profits.

We have become inured to the reality of a government that has allowed the development of an economic system that shovels wealth from the poor and the middle class up to the already wealthy shareholder class. A powerless government is not very comforting as we confront a future with AI. In the balance between government and corporation, the corporation has won. Financial capitalism, shareholder capitalism, corporate capitalism have used our collective ostrich-like tendencies in giving us just enough to keep quiet, to move us into domination by the profit motive. Our billionaire class, primarily male, has won.

Until now. The power released into society by ‘Me Too’ has been greatly underestimated. The rise of the black woman in politics, ready and ably positioned to take on the rich and powerful, changes everything. The social activism emerging from every corner of society, whether on the streets, in coffee shops or institutions quietly designing new paradigms, is ready to join forces and initiate a new era.

The universe itself has intervened and made it clear that the earth will not accept any more abuse, the corporate go-to method of extracting profit. The Christian Nationalists  (like Mike Johnson, our new Republican Speaker of the House) currently trying to convince us that Christianity is on their side, having resorted to rejecting Jesus’ actual teaching on the basis of its being too weak, have failed to reach the masses. We know deep down that Jesus was right, we need love and acceptance and universal empowerment, not domination by the wealthy and privileged.

An Economic System That Works For All

 

A Proposal for an Economic System That Works for All

Let’s consider a reasonable income today of about $60,000, with the government taking about $12,000 of this in the form of taxes of one sort or another. (The average personal income in the United States is $63,214, with the median income across the country being $44,225, according to the World Population Review.)

The proposal is that everyone should receive $1,000 a month in the form of an unconditional basic income (UBI); everyone should then be guaranteed to receive another $1,000 a month for working 10 hours each week, which works out at $25 per hour. After this, people are on their own, as they are today, to make up whatever more they desire and can achieve.

Clearly this needs some explanation and justification, and suggestions as to how to fund it.

 

Unconditional Basic Income (UBI)

Nature and the planet pre-existed any person, and therefore cannot be considered to be a commodity simply for economic exploitation. Nature makes everything freely available to all on an equal basis. Given our emphasis in the Constitution on private property, including ownership of land, much that was freely available is now in private hands. However, the basic human right still exists, and therefore the UBI of $1,000 expresses this right of access to nature, within the system that we have developed.

This should rightfully be funded via a land-value tax, or nature value tax, which recognizes the community as the actual source of the increase in value of the land, and therefore modifies the right to private ownership of nature. An alternative would be to divide all the land into 335 million small parcels of equal value and distribute them amongst the population. This is not possible! A land value tax ensures that the landlord does not automatically reap all the investment of the community into his or her own hands, as happens in our current system.

Another source of funding for a UBI would be for the central bank to issue money directly into everyone’s bank account instead of lending it into circulation via the banks, who then lend it out to corporations and others. A system based on lending is unsustainable, as is obvious today. This idea would need much more research, but it is out there.

 

Guaranteed Community Income (GCI)

If all our needs could be met simply through what the planet supplies, then we should just share it all out and that’s all we need to do. But of course that doesn’t take into account fundamental human nature, which includes the drive for self-improvement, self-expression and creative achievement. Not to mention that Planet Earth doesn’t come with pre-existing houses, clothing, etc. which make up our basic needs for survival. We cannot expect that these should be provided for us by other people, without any effort or input on our part.

Today there is no guarantee of a job, and millions are living with no source of income, other than handouts from the government, sometimes not even that. It is only reasonable that if people have to have money to live, then everyone must be guaranteed a source of such income, enough for at least survival at a minimal standard of living. Therefore it makes sense that everyone should participate in the  responsibility to form the planet and its resources into livable form, to ensure the basic necessities of survival for all.

However, while we may accept this much responsibility, few would feel they have to accept responsibility to make the ultrawealthy even wealthier, which is the case today for millions of workers. This second $1,000 then should express the basic needs of community, such as maintaining houses, planting and harvesting vegetables and fruits for the community, raising and educating children, working in local hospitals or schools etc.

This should probably be funded or administrated on the community level, rather than from the federal or state governments, since once bureaucracy is involved everything becomes more complex and money gets lost to administration. If every person gets a year or so of training in a trade or a skill as part of their high school experience, then they can be a relatively low-cost source of needed labor for their community residents. Those who want to pay more and have a more professional job performed will employ professionals still of course. Hospitals, medical clinics, schools etc. can pay for the labor they receive on this basis.

Most people will probably prefer to work in a traditional corporate or small business setting generally speaking, but the availability of community work would allow people to take time off their job, to take time to raise small children, and just to live on a simple level if they prefer to do so. The income can be supplemented with part time work as needed or desired. It does not allow for people to get rich, but it provides a base for everyone which is simply lacking today.

The availability of such community work can eliminate the need for much of our welfare system, which is suffocating our nation.

 

Traditional Employment and Corporations

Those who are happy in their current form of employment will choose to continue with that. Many people make enough money to compensate for the long hours and other stresses that they experience at work. However, there are many systemic problems within our corporation-based economy.

·       Monopolies need to be broken up

·       We need to stop rent-seeking in all its forms

·       Reinstate the rewards for productivity rather than for finance capitalism

·       Limit the wealth accumulation that created huge inequality

·       Remove the responsibility for healthcare from corporations

If a corporation can make profit without resorting to unfair practices, and greed can be limited, then capitalism can be restored to its original intended form, and we can move into a much better distribution of wealth.

An Economic System That Honors Our Bigger Purpose

Confined to our homes by a virus for which we are severely underprepared, the whole world is faced with the inadequacies of our systems. This timeout from our usual responsibilities gives us an opportunity, challenging us to reassess who we are, what values we are expressing in how we live, and how can we choose the best path to a future that manifests our vision for one united world.

Besides the obvious failures of the healthcare system, we can see that our current Western economic system fails to serve our deeper purposes in life in many ways. We spend most of our lives in debt, trying to catch up, and figuring out how to pay for healthcare, education, etc., instead of being able to invest time and love in our children.

Given that the majority of humans see life as leading to some kind of eternal existence, how can we design an economic system that allows for the greatest freedom to make our own decisions, and that enables personal growth? It would be nice to move to an eternal world somewhat prepared!

Humans grow by receiving love, and by giving love, by investing effort, through relationships, by exercising their own responsibility towards living a life of value fulfillment. We grow by living for both the whole purpose and the individual purpose, and especially through investing in our children and communities.

Indigenous communities sustained their way of life throughout thousands of years, supported by nature, and without destroying that natural world. Despite its technological achievements, Western thinking, originating in Europe but now worldwide, has led us to the brink of destruction of the natural world, as now seen in the sudden clearing of atmospheric pollution as human economic activity is forcibly shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead of going back to total communal ownership, hunting, fishing, and raising GMO-free crops, consider what could have emerged from a respectful analysis of the two ways of life that clashed as Europeans moved into the New World, sadly displacing the original residents.

There are a few basic facts to take as a foundation for our future economics: the universe provides all of nature for free, for the equal use of every person. There is no income requirement for what is provided. However, shaping the natural environment for the purpose of maintaining humanity does require some effort. Both facts lead to one level of responsibility, and so far, there is no responsibility on anyone’s part to work anywhere near as long hours as is typical in America today, because ensuring that everyone has a house, food and basic needs would not involve more than probably one or two days a week, if everyone contributes.

The second level of responsibility is oriented more toward growth of humanity as a whole. Our absolute responsibility is to raise healthy and happy children, and guarantee that their individual survival needs are met, allowing them to be ready to work on their own personal goals and values, to express their own individuality in the context of becoming loving, capable adults. This inevitably leads to the evolution of humanity, the expression of humanity’s values.

Indigenous thinking, embedded in the world as part of nature as they were, is necessary but not sufficient, in that it is unlikely such a way of life in itself would have led to the current level of progress in science, technology, psychology, etc. However, by merging with and influencing Western values, there could well have been a much more healthy development of all these areas of knowledge.

Thus we are led, in analyzing what could have been, to incorporate the best of both worlds. Simply jettisoning capitalism would leave us bereft of what could be a very strong pillar of our economic future, while ignoring our identity as community, we already can see has severe consequences, particularly in terms of honoring the divine, unique, and sacred value of each and every individual.

Our society simply throws away those who haven’t achieved parity in the economic competition that we think of as life. They end up in poverty, in economic slavery, working all hours for survival only, never attaining the economic capacity to move further toward value fulfillment, thereby impoverishing humanity beyond any imagining.

Capitalism has shown itself to be highly vulnerable to being hijacked by the “winners” in the economic race, and needs some very fundamental modification. Firstly, we must recognize the unconditional aspect of nature’s contribution. Without nature, without the bees to pollinate, without the tendency of seeds to grow, existence itself would be threatened, and no corporation would make an easy profit if they had to replace all the functions of nature through their own ingenuity. This belongs equally to every person, because we are all equally created as part of nature.

Therefore we can see two distinct levels of economic thinking here, the first being the meeting of our needs within a hugely benevolent, well-suited planet, and the second being the enabling of growth through the creative use of nature and our relationships with each other. Thus, every person should receive the basics, within the context of a couple days’ work a week for the benefit of maintaining this basic level of life, and once that is achieved, then beyond that people may freely work toward profit and creative expression of what is important to them. I say freely because work as we know it is not necessarily the highest value, but rather we would hope to reach the end of our lives as more mature, loving people ready to move forward to the next phase. Work is part of this of course, but certainly not the whole.

Thus a person who wants a very nice home should be able to achieve that on the basis of hard work, but to the extent she or he uses more than say half an acre of land on which to build, there should be recognition that the community must be compensated for the loss of the use of this extra land. If people use nature for economic purposes, and obviously they have to, then they can receive the rewards of their transforming nature into useful commodities, but also compensate the whole for whatever they use that rightfully belongs to the whole.

A nature-value tax would be a natural source of income distributed to everyone, out of which those who choose not to work (other than the time needed for maintaining the communal level of life) for some time, or even for large parts of their lives, may do so freely and without guilt of feeling like a parasite. At this point, spending time at home raising one’s children in this country is considered almost parasitic behavior. Clearly this violates the deeper purpose of life, and yet we are all driven to live in this fashion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbziwXeg7rQ&t=4s

Without the obligation to work for survival, people would be able to choose whether or not to take a job, and employers would have to pay enough to entice workers to work. Our view of corporations would evolve, and we would see them more as sources of community value, rather than as ways of enriching the owners, the current “super-rich.” Corporate leadership would be compensated for their time and work, well-compensated, but would not be as excessively rich as they are today. However they would have people’s respect and gratitude instead of resentment. They would not be forever fending off lawsuits, because people’s anger would be relieved as we all start to feel more valued and loved. Even inter-corporate cooperation might evolve into a real phenomenon, beyond simply that of buying up smaller corporations to increase short-term profits.

The sharing of corporate returns might also prove a source of some kind of living wage, or basic corporate income, in such a world.

Freedom from debt and from bureaucracy-imposed burdens are both necessary aspects of any future system. Servicing debt is maybe the most debilitating aspect of our current economic lives. If we have to have a system with built-in debt, then at least build a protective wall around the retail economy and people’s savings, so that no one can lose everything because of such debt. Likewise we need a greatly strengthened firewall between retail and the speculative behaviors that have forced us to bail out wealthy corporations, especially banks, several times in recent decades.

Government must also evolve to stop using our technology to impose order upon us under the guise of providing for us. Such evolution though requires a much greater level of trust of each other, because so much of the endless filling out of forms and paying vast amounts for insurance emanates from our distrust. Lawyers and courts have taken over so much of our decision-making, leaving us very inadequate in our capacity to solve problems by working things out together, and leaving us vulnerable economically as we have to pay for this distrust. We have not learned wisdom in the handling of an information economy, and until this evolves, our data is used for the profit of some and for the ease of controlling the population by others.

Capitalism has given us ways to use money by investing in corporations and businesses such that our money can grow even while we are not actively working. This has been a great relief to many, in providing retirement income and freeing up one’s time. Simply discarding our capitalistic system devalues the Western progress that freed us from so much of our servitude to nature. The path to living within the natural world and also freeing ourselves from the limitations of living only as part of the natural world is a path that requires thought and universal values.

Western values need to be incorporated in any movement toward the future of course, so that we have hope to see a world that incorporates intellectual accomplishment and individual freedom, but we need more. We need also a world that values justice and heart more than intellect alone.♦

Evil Revisioned

Humanity has been caught up in the story of the first transgression as a means of explaining our traumatized reality since people first began to wonder why human lives were dominated by suffering in a world of so much beauty and harmony. Our existence has been almost entirely dictated by religious thought for thousands of years, demonstrating the absolute need for a sense of meaning and purpose at the core of our being.

But the western world moved on to a purposeless model for life, based on a materialistic paradigm within which science could grow, and current developments have brought us to a singular challenge in time, in which our choices today determine whether we move forward to a true spirituality, or whether we hold on to the flaws in thinking that have designed our past. As part of that, we have to make decisions about the myth that has existed as the root of so much of our troubles. Therefore let’s look at an alternative telling of the story of our original ancestors.

Eve was feeling confused. She really loved their teacher Lucifer, and he seemed so incredibly wise and knowledgeable, but she had to admit what he was teaching her wouldn’t pass the Adam test. But then since Adam hardly ever even turned up for their lessons any more, she felt annoyed that she should even think about how Adam would react. He was missing out on so much stuff that was really fascinating, and he would just never know how the universe came into being, for one thing.

But Eve had to admit she sometimes felt that Lucifer was teaching her things that maybe God wouldn’t have brought up, and at times she even felt like he didn’t seem to think God was as incredible as she’d always believed without question. The angels had done most of the work in creating the universe, from Lucifer’s perspective.

And gradually over time, this situation became more extreme, and Eve forgot that she’d felt uncomfortable on occasion, and came to believe everything Lucifer told her. If she occasionally worried, she argued with herself that God wouldn’t have put her in the care of a teacher if it wasn’t all OK.

So when that terrible day came that Lucifer seduced her into eating that fruit, and she realized the depth of his betrayal as he laughed at her ignorance and gullibility, she was beyond devastated. He told her that her actions were unforgiveable, and she had taken the whole of creation away from God, who would judge her forever and ever.

She sat at home, deeply miserable, not knowing what to do, and trying hard to avoid Adam, knowing he would see her state.

Then one day Adam came by looking for her, since he hadn’t seen her for a week or so. He came in and immediately saw how she was feeling, and he knew right away that it was Lucifer. He was about to explode and accuse her of being so stupid, but he saw tears fill her eyes, and his heart was touched.

He reached out to her, embracing her like a big brother, and told her, “Eve, I don’t know what happened, or what’s right and wrong here, but we can work it out. I’m here for you no matter what. It’s OK, we’ll go ask God, She often takes a walk in the Garden round about this time of day, She’ll know what to do.”

Eve was pretty scared, but Adam took her hand and she let him tell God they needed help, and gradually she let it all out, how things had progressed, and how she’d felt bad at first, but then let herself be led because Lucifer seemed so powerful and convincing. And Adam was shocked as the whole story came out, but he loved his sister and stood with her, even when God told her she would have to go through a difficult course to put right all that had gone wrong.

And after a few years, Adam and Eve had their first baby, and they were deeply happy, and felt deeply loved by God. 

Sometimes she would sit and think back to that awful week, and feel so overwhelmingly grateful that she wasn’t trying to raise children with that terrible feeling inside. She knew she would never have been able to love her children fully as they needed with such a heavy core of unresolved guilt and betrayal. She would find herself looking over at Adam, and realizing how he had come through for them at the right time, no matter how much he seemed to space out here and there when household chores needed doing. And if he didn’t know much about how the universe was made, well, she could always teach the kids herself.

Here we meet Adam as true hero and lover, quite different from the archetypal hero of warrior and winner of fair lady, who thereafter worships him and lives to make him a success. The alternate path of overcoming the depth of guilt while bathed in a universal sea of accusation and dismissal has taken women thousands of years at least. The monotheistic religions no doubt helped in the sense of making the accusation explicit, plunging the world into the reign of the “Sky Father”, who suddenly cared above all else about the actions of His creations, in contradistinction to the lax acceptance of the “Earth Mother.” But neither would be enough to lead humanity into a realm of spirituality that could bring a simple healing of the heart. Only today as women reclaim their true authentic power are we seeing developments that can lead us into a future of beauty and love.

People commit crimes as the result of a long process, maybe an ancestral process over which they have no control, but simply find themselves born into. With women’s power severely constricted there has not been enough kindness and deep acceptance in the world to bring about real steps towards an ideal that still exists deep in the philosophical core of each and every being on earth. Men’s power has been twisted toward methods of external control and physical force, and history has been the history of war and conflict.

However, we can see that the root of the problem today is accusation. That doesn’t mean there are no consequences for mistakes or criminal actions, it means we have to find a way to deal with these that is not simply punitive, but also restorative and healing. Some parts of the world have made major steps towards humanizing their criminal justice systems, some have made backward steps, like America in recent decades. But the consequences of these choices are being made clear, as the criminal justice system threatens to take over almost every other aspect of life in many communities.

We are discovering that an excessively male-designed style of government, while having served America well in the past, has serious flaws when the majority of the people are excluded from meaningful input. Impasse has effectively settled in to reign in Washington DC, and in the European Union, Russia, the Middle East, except for where enough power is centered in one person that human rights can be ignored with impunity. And all the current dysfunction on display worldwide could have been avoided by simple kindness, humility and love as the response to mistakes, rather than heaping on the accusation.

As long as humanity is connected to God, because God’s input was necessary for Eve.

A real connection to God is not the same as reading a list of laws and punishments from a holy book. The time for such an intellectual approach to relating to God is over, as masses of people have already in their hearts walked away from this. The time has come for knowing that deep within each person lies the indivisible consciousness of God, the universal oneness from which our whole being unfolded. God is indeed the ground of our being, not primarily the ruler and lawgiver.

God cannot truly be known except insofar as God’s real nature and heart has been manifested within the physical universe. Without this caveat, there would be no need for a physical world, everything could have existed within the mind of God, and everything would have been harmonious and perfect, and from God’s perspective, boring and meaningless.  It would have been like having just nature, a great science project, but not much more. We are required to go deep inside to discover the nature of God, and live what we find there. Finding God is the same as finding the deepest, most meaningful self within, and then making it real. 

Those We Have Imprisoned Will Liberate Us

The black community in America is dealing with issues within the criminal justice system that derive from a complex history of loss of every basic human right; identity, freedom,  the right to protect one’s own family, even self-determination. Resolving some of the disparities in policing, in sentencing, in ascribing guilt or innocence, is only a step towards justice. The bigger issues cannot be disentangled from the daily lives of African Americans without being addressed at the deepest levels. And the white community, those who show up now as descendants of slave owners and benefiters from white privilege, can only really offer opportunities to allow for healing. The healing must take place from within the abused community, as reclaiming their right to power is one huge step that must occur through the process.

With that realization we see that healing is already taking place, as African Americans have demonstrated their undisputed ability to hold positions of power in this country. And on top of that, they are demonstrating a heart of overcoming resentment in reaching out to the white community; the relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama clearly demonstrates this willingness to move forward and leave behind the past. The mutual respect and even affection are indisputable.

However, the legal system which focuses almost exclusively in many urban areas in America on the black population serves by its very nature to separate and hence try to destroy the black community. White privilege is so deeply ingrained that it is invisible to most white people. It is just assumed, for example, that following the expected norms within a company will result in promotion and advancement, and white people do not see that as privilege. But black people have not been part of that automatic advancement. Even today the black person who advances in his or her career is too often seen as something of the exception to the norm, one who has overcome a disadvantage.

Often advancing in the career world is accompanied by leaving behind one’s origins in community. Joining the world of privilege has consequences far deeper than simply economic benefit, because it generally requires a person to adopt white values, and see themselves as part of the white community. Giving up one’s own heritage is accompanied by all sorts of unacknowledged wounds, a slicing away of much of the depth within the self. In the same way, living as though the natural world is simply a source of economic wealth has separated those with European ancestry from humanity’s own deep identification as part of nature.  Had the original settlers embraced the native peoples when occupying this land, this self-identity could have been preserved and even revered.

The land of opportunity, the land that promises government by the people for the people, has abandoned some large part of the people. Until black people occupy enough positions of power within the criminal justice system as representatives of the black race, so as to transform the system itself in the direction of community values, reformation that accomplishes real healing seems left to the community itself. And that entails a clear expression of the deepest values from the ancestral heritage, and creative analysis and application of these values to transport them from Africa of hundreds of years ago to America of the 21^st century.

Traditional values must be meshed with western science, creating a synthesis able to absorb today’s technology without destroying yesterday’s deep inner self. They must be able to offer help to any people trapped in today’s shallowness and materialistic value system that leaves us vulnerable to losing the deeper values of this country itself. And reclaiming historical depths of character is probably the only way to bring us out of today’s crises, which leaves us to look within to rediscover ourselves.

The way a country conducts its justice system has a great deal to say about its values, and we are failing on that very point, how to handle accusation without losing love. Accusation has taken over this country, and we need to look at each other without contempt again, to respect each other and accept that we cannot know another’s thoughts and motivations enough to simply condemn them. We cannot just follow killing with killing in return. We cannot impose life sentences without self-examination to determine if we are not already sentencing people to lives of injustice every day.

We have a very bright future just around the corner, but our very technological progress can also be what kills us without a healing within the whole of society itself.

Justice Requires Heart

Delaware’s criminal justice system is facing pivotal decisions. Over several decades, Delaware has been attempting to solve many problems by criminalizing a vast new array of actions, resulting in a hugely expanded prison population, with crises at every stage in the system.

In a high trust society, people have a strong role in judicial proceedings, and generally speaking the need for the proliferation of laws doesn’t exist, because there is confidence in the ability of a human being to interpret existing laws, and recognize motivations so as to administer justice. However, in recent decades, the laws have proliferated in an effort to define more and more precisely every possible action that is deemed unlawful. Justice has been replaced with the quest for law and order.

The rule of law may have run its course, in its present form. Delaware has many people in high positions within the criminal justice system who have recognized that our system has serious problems, and are working hard to make positive changes: our Chief Justice Leo Strine, our Chief Magistrate Alan Davis, our Public Defender Brendan O’Neill, even our Attorney General Matt Denn.

Our law is based upon Roman law, which derives partly from the laws of the Old Testament. However, there has always been a law with a different base, the law of indigenous peoples, which is based on one’s identity as part of a community. Today we see the need to reclaim something of this approach, because if we don’t move into a law based on heart and universal love we cannot solve our current dilemma.

The fundamentals of our law are unbalanced, heavily skewed towards the masculine, punitive approach, expressing in no small degree the doctrine of survival of the fittest. Native American law is based on the ideal of the harmonious society. Elders of a tribe are involved in seeking ways to restore balance between the perpetrator and the person wronged. When Europeans came to this new world, they could have embraced the best of both justice systems, instead of which the adversarial and punitive approach won out completely.

We are living with the results of that decision right now, and have reached the limits that a society can maintain and still remain a nation.

Before we move any further along the road towards greater punishment and stronger laws, we need to stop and take stock of where we are, and how we can express in our justice system that each person has intrinsic, unique value. We need to ensure that the feminine voice is heard loud and strong, reflecting the realistic and fundamental change in the role of women in our society. Wherever you look today in Delaware you will find women on the front line of change.

Given the lack of confidence in the current state of the criminal justice system, why are we in such a hurry to resurrect the most extreme and irreversible punishment, the death penalty?  There was no outcry from the people when the death penalty was declared unconstitutional last year and yet immediately a group of lawmakers vowed to reinstate it. It would seem we have a great deal of work to do to restore justice to our justice system, which makes it very premature to focus on killing criminals.

The culture of policing today tends to define reality for a young law enforcement officer more than any ideals which drove him or her to enter the profession. Guns on both sides, the use of force as routine, the conscious or unconscious racial biases, all affect what can be achieved in terms of justice. It is understandable that those lawmakers who are ex-law enforcement officers may feel the call to restore the death penalty, because it feels like every effort has been unsuccessful, but maybe that is because we need a restored sense of community, based on reconciliation, not more punishment.

We need our legislators to be the ones leading the reforms, so that huge numbers of Delaware residents do not routinely find themselves in desperate situations which can drive them to desperate acts. It seems morally questionable at best to focus on the death penalty while there is real desperation in so many of Delaware’s communities. After all, the death penalty itself can be resurrected later, if people still feel the need after reforms have been implemented, unlike those put to death in such excessive haste.

Society Growing Up At Last

Women were only just starting to realize they were in prison – or rather in the dolls’ house – back in the middle of last century. They certainly weren’t ready to get out there and take on the world, because they hadn’t yet taken on their own self-images. In other words, they still blamed themselves and hated themselves, and they still thought the way to become equal was to become like men, to emulate all the broken behavior that man exhibited in their quest for power, control and riches, because that brought the rewards society offered. 

But here we are two generations or so further along the path toward true freedom, self-acceptance and manifestation of our own true inner power. It looks quite different from that of men, and it is going to change the world.

Young women of today exhibit a caring that comes solely from within their own beings, and experience a willingness to judge according to their own opinions, not according to opinions that would be approved by men. Young men of today have become far more comfortable with their own inner femininity than one would ever have thought possible within a generation or two. The older generations are denouncing most of this, desperately trying to draw back the youth into the failures of previous times. But it’s difficult when just about everyone agrees what previous times led to was the chaos we see today, the inequality, the over incarceration, the desire to step back from the position as leader of the free world and focus on making the rich richer as a good American should do.

We should have been able to claim our freedom to be ourselves back then after the sixties, but all this inner searching takes time. At that time it proved quite easy for authorities to clamp down, for assassinations to dispel hope, for unthinking politicians to jump on the tough on crime bandwagon to avoid defeat at the polls. Today women everywhere are speaking out, minorities are not just accepting that they can be imprisoned, shot and killed by bad policing, and even those in top positions in many states are working toward reform, because they see the harm that is being done.

The biggest barriers to positive change come from the lawmaking community, the rule of law, and those addicted to the profits that have accompanied the growth industries of criminalizing everything and taking away most controls over the financial services industry. Letting go of these addictions will be a long process, maybe made unnecessary if we have another collapse of the financial system which is certainly a strong possibility, but anyway something we have to deal with in a different way from the past, because women’s values are different. 

Where the law contradicts love, we must go with love. Not the urgent need for love that mimics love, but a real love that extends to everyone on the planet. Where people are thrust into poverty and homelessness, we must provide a basic income and a home. Where people lose their source of support, we must find a way to provide for all of our needs together.