deepundergroundpoetry.com

Know the Issues

      
When a baby is born they live in perpetual amazement with guidance of intuition.  A child possesses qualities of naturalness and honesty; always wanting to know how something came about with inoffensive straightforwardness.  As adults, sometimes we destroy that curiosity, and by the time that they are nine or ten they’re often tired and old and ready to call it quits altogether.  Only meandering through the rest of their life wondering what might have been.  Living in hidden fear wrapped in everyone else’s ideas of what something should be; we need new ideas.  It is too large of an issue for anyone, or any one thing in subject because there are just too many reasons and aspects.   I’ve chosen one, and that is the relationship of crime and poverty, and then I give an example of the changing society that we face.   Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children’s wellbeing. This shows that effective public policies are not effective; they’re only words of inaction.  Children do not live up to their capacity for greatness because society is an always reflecting perception of what is – is what always will be.  Children are natural born geniuses in that they know absolutely nothing until we teach them how to think.  The most important and difficult challenge that the world faces today are the issues surrounding our children in propelling them into an ever changing and diverse society; teaching children how to think in ways that will make a difference for permanent changes and improvement upon society.   And it’s not up to them.  It’s up to us as parents, teachers, and a community in looking at society, and realizing how it’s presented to them as they are growing, as this is what makes the difference.    
     
Poverty and illiteracy are passed through generations from the adults to the children with the end result being crime and apathy; stagnation of society.  It’s really sad that in America, 85% of juveniles in court are illiterate – and this is how it happens:  Illiteracy is related to poverty, and poverty is related to crime, punishment, and then the multitude of mental disorders that go with it.  It is everywhere, and it should not be here.  We have a government that has the means and we have citizens that have the capabilities to do better.  When you are among the poverty stricken, you look for ways to get by; it’s not the child’s fault because they know-no better; their parents are only trying to survive and so are they.    
   
All parents want the best for their children. But when it is a constant struggle to work 50-60 + hours a week for minimum wage, and then keep up on all the new gadgets, hi-techs, new shoes, bicycles, and all the things that go along with a child; some thing’s will and do fall by the wayside.  And it’s usually the togetherness, and what’s inside of us in teaching the golden rules of humanness.   Parents get mentally exhausted with all the needs.  And the child gets exhausted as well.   Parents worry, but children worry too, and then when they're teens they only want to get away.  You could fill pages and pages with the flow of issues of today’s society as to do with children and the future within the realms of Ethics.  It is in giving them the freedom to explore the possibilities, and teaching them to dream the good dream, but above all, be kind to one another and pay attention to each other’s needs.  We are not policies, we are human beings.    
     
Proof of concept, and to lead by example.    
     
It’s never certain when a new society begins. There are no edges to a new society; they overlap as one takes the place of the other. Society is not stagnant and it makes no difference if you know it, or whether you believe it.  On a very obvious level, if you lived in hunting and gathering society you could not listen in on your favorite music, watch TV, play video games, or be on the internet.  On a deeper level, if you lived in this era you would not feel the same about life as right now. You would not have the same values or have the same belief system, or you would not hold particular aspirations for the future. You would be locked into the attitudes and views that come with the hunting and gathering way of life.    
   
We are in the midst of the postindustrial society, a society based on information, services, and high technology. How did we get here? There was the pastoral society, horticulture society, domestication revolution, agriculture society, the agro-revolution, industrial revolution, industrial society. What’s next? The biotech society: a society whose economy is increasingly centered on modified genetics to produce food and materials; it will emerge. Imagine: Tobacco that fights cancer so that you can smoke your way to good health – corn that blocks herpes and prevents pregnancy so that we can eat our corn flakes of a morning and have safe sex all day – goat’s milk that contains spider silk to make fishing lines and body armor, getting our daily allowance of calcium in so that we can cast a biodegradable line  and not get killed while being shot at. DNA that you can snap together like Lego blocks, biobricks to build better life forms, bacteria that secretes diesel fuel where we can put our germ droppings into our gas tanks, part-human animals that produce medicines that will secrete the latest need from their liver for whatever vexes us next.  I know that such products sound like science fiction, but we already have goats that make spider silk. Human genes have already been inserted into animals, and they do produce medicine. The snap-together bio-bricks should be available soon. Perhaps even one day, you will be able to design your own bacterium – or even an elephant.   The economy of this new biotech society will center on applying and alternating genetics structures; both plant and animal to produce food, medicine, and materials.  We already have the bacterium that produces diesel fuel, but it isn't harvestable yet.  We now have Orange juice spawned of spinach genes; your children will never know where that strength came from.    
   
In today’s world, the changes swirling around us are so extensive that we may be stepping into a new type of society altogether if we don’t kill each other first with the misuse of trust, public policy, and in pushing materialism that ruins the mind and causes laziness.  There’s nothing wrong with flying by the seat of your pants when enjoying a journey, but I still believe in the destination.  And I believe it is in the decisions that we make today that will result in getting anywhere; for good or bad, it’s up to us.  The bottom line is definitely education, literacy, and determinacy.  But ultimately it’s our humanness, and in finding that balance.  If there is a child out there with the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, I want to meet them.   If there is someone out there with the depth of soul as that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this world needs him now more than ever.  I don’t have answers, but I do know the issues.
Written by Pishashee
Published
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