Thinking about the Problem…

Back in the days when I did useful work for a living, aka, shift supervisor in a pocket size little chemical batch plant, there was a situation that took several days, the better part of a week, to resolve. One of our distillation systems was misbehaving in a most novel manner. Damn thing simply refused to run, and no one including yours truly could figure out why. It was a head scratching cuss and discuss kind of problem, way off the book and nowhere in the history or the horror stories.

After a couple of days, when all the conventional things had been tested and dismissed as the driving cause, the situation came to a standstill. As the production line emptied out downstream of the bottleneck we all just shook our heads and, each to our own best guess, started thinking outside the box. What MIGHT make the system behave like that? It had to be something, and the general consensus was we were not on the bad side of any witches powerful enough to tinker with the laws of physics.

After a twelve hour shift where the situation had not changed in the least the operator in charge of the system wrote in her logbook “thinking about the problem.” Everyone chuckled, and no one said anything formal, she’d told the absolute truth. That was the function of the operator logbooks, to pass those critical tidbits of information shift to shift so that even if things were not running smoothly the oncoming operator had a good handle on the system status, what had been tried and to what results. The logs eliminated a lot of duplicated effort and made it easier to know what remained to be tried to get things back on track. The operator logs were a most useful thing, an evolved system and convention that shy of gross neglect or mass calamity were off limits to management critique. They were the operator’s logs, we had our own.

That distillation system was not a simple thing, but it was nowhere near, not even close, to being as complex as any social system, which brings me to the point of this post.

The social system which is the United States of America is not running right, not at all, and as far as I can see no one has enough of a workable handle on the ultimate why to attempt a repair. Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about the problem. You can call this my log entry on the subject.

I was reading today on a website titled The Conversation concerning the problem, more specifically how the problem is shaping the upcoming presidential election here in the United States. Now most of the folks contributing the articles have “doctor” associated to their name, and some prestigious bastion of academia somewhere on Planet Earth certifying their competence in their chosen discipline. I’ve been reading what the experts on society have to say on the situation. It is after all a social problem.

Of course the names Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were everywhere, almost as common as the name Donald Trump, and of course each article ran out a line of reasoning on the hows and whys of each candidate’s impact on the situation. Being academics of course they were prone to using obscure names for some study or body of academic work to represent a line of thought in support of theirs, that’s just the way academics are. Most generally they don’t mean to come off as ivory tower elitists, but that habit often gets them ignored for lack of a vocabulary shared with any save their own (I want to put in a most positive attaboy to the good folks at The Conversation for requiring, or possibly providing, hyperlinks in the body of the text leading to a workable definition of such terms, it made it almost easy to decipher what was really being said).

It was following several of those links that turned on the light for me, popped up a thought not seen in any of the experts’ line of reasoning. The top of the tree were the terms neoliberal (the strangely misnamed trend to privatize what were once and should remain governmental/social functions of public ownership and public responsibility) and the “gig” economy (no permanent job, just the ever escalating tension and instability of seeking one subsistence grade “gig” after another, a situation common to the club musician’s lifestyle infamous for drink, drugs and dames with no future in sight), and the bottom of the thought not seen elsewhere which is the ultimate consequences of the aforementioned on the most absolutely critical of social functions: the ultimate success (or failure) of rearing children into a sane and stable adulthood to continue the society into the future.

IF:  

It is allowed that a stable home life is a mandatory prerequisite for successful child rearing –AND- It is further allowed that a stable home life includes a parental example-of-future not stressed to despair and self destructive behaviors by neoliberalism and a gigEconomy while attempting that most massive labor of love

THEN:

it must follow that to avoid cultural collapse to the ever accelerating trend of young individuals entering society voluntarily adopting perverse lifestyles of acute sterility (that facilitate living in the “gig” economy… player_gay_lesbian, etcetera et al ad nauseam… a trend no doubt inspiring a great deal of quiet glee in the leadership of China) in response to the above mentioned despair then the undoing of the betrayal approaching treason which has so damaged the productive foundation of America, to wit the working middle class, all of those things not only should be reversed they MUST be reversed as rapidly as possible without regard to financial or political cost.

Now the academics I was reading were quite smugly touting as necessary, inevitable and irreversible the very things which must be reversed to preserve the United States as a functioning free nation rather than a vassal state indentured to any of several of the world’s older, and most generally Asian, cultures. But go figure. They’re academics, and for all their protestations to the contrary the core of academia is the preservation of the status quo which supports their lifestyle, even if by any ethical definition imaginable the proper name for the current status quo is Treason and Treachery. Sorry guys, you didn’t convince me to capitulate and accept what has happened to my nation, quite the opposite as a matter of fact.

Essentially what needs to happen is the United States of America needs to tell the remainder of the world “Have a nice century, we’ll see you in about fifty years, we need to set our own house in order. China did it, it’s our turn now.”

In the execution of that resolve I would support the following:

1) Announce by every media in every land that the United States is closing its’ borders in six months from point, and that all resident aliens should either return to their native country or accept naturalization. Frankly, for what will need to happen, they’d be better off going home. Prior to that announcement equip every embassy of the United States, world wide, with the capability for nuclear self destruct. Fuck with the embassy and the city it’s in goes away.

2) Bring the American army home, all of it. Tell the world we will no longer police your idiocy, if you can’t figure out how to get along then you’ll have to live or die with the consequences. Land that army half south in Mexico under the command of the DEA and march it north, taking advantage of strategic airpower flying short haul heavy tactical stomp flat into the fucking ground anything even suspected as being associated to drug cartel holdings. They want to worship death? Show them their God.

3) Having marched that army across the border invoke the ultimate power of imminent domain and bump everyone, and I do mean everyone, twenty miles north of that border and establish a high tech kill zone in the evacuated region. Going south? Free passage assured. Going north? Please don’t, you’re not going to make it and the vultures and coyotes are already getting unhealthily fat. Same-same the Canadian border, just reverse  the directions.

4) Restore SAC’s combat air patrol re-armed with modern air launched ballistic missiles. Put the boomers back to sea, the heavy hitter submarines carrying a full combat load of nuclear weapons, open targeting captain’s discretion. That captain’s orders? If you can’t raise anyone, if you haven’t heard from us in seventy two hours? Start blowing shit up.

(Oh, and as a side note? Those submarines should be primarily crewed (m/f ratio 1:10) by the most genetically diverse group of proven mothers that can be found, they might be living on those boats for quite some time and turn out to be the seed stock that will repopulate the planet if anyone is stupid enough to think they can execute a military conquest of the United States while the overhaul is underway.)

Make it known to the world that from point on if one of our innocents is killed the nation sponsoring that killing will suffer one thousand deaths… and demonstrate the fact that we can deliver such death with unannounced leaflet drops over nations reasonable to suspect as fostering covert operations within the territorial boundaries of the United States.

The above should serve as sufficient warning to the world the United States is serious about this one. We still have, even yet, the military muscle to back the world off for a little while.

Sadly, backing the world off is actually the easy part, and probably cheaper to mount and maintain than trying to police that world. Likely having spent a most chaotic year securing our own borders how should the United States proceed to set its’ own house in order?

The question, oh gentle and likely horrified reader, is do we have the wisdom to effectively deal with problems here at home now that we have the system isolated where it’s actually possible to start troubleshooting the situation so we can go to work on it? That is by far  the more demanding question.

I am sworn to defend The Constitution of the United States, it is an oath I will honor with what is left of my life at need. I wish I had more life left to offer my country.

Since the Constitution is the document which established this nation it would seem reasonable to convene a second Continental Congress even as it was done in the beginning to debate a second major series of amendments to that magnificent document addressing the issues which have arisen in the centuries since it was first implemented.

When the Constitution was first penned 95% of the population was involved in agriculture, we lived on the land. Such is not the case now. It is time for the United States to recall the wisdom of the founding fathers and apply that wisdom to the task of safeguarding freedom and dignity for the citizens of the United States now that the ratios are almost exactly reversed. We must apply that wisdom to the enterprises of the urban, the technical, and yes, the global.

To accomplish the construction of such a structure will require the deepest levels of introspection, the most comprehensive self knowledge ever asked of any population. If freedom is to be maintained the first order of business is to actually understand, soul deep within ourselves with all the advances of the modern considered, what it is to be free.

It is an effort such has never been mounted before. No one can be left out of that effort, no one. Such a Continental Congress would of necessity need to send ambassadors and emissaries to every segment and every region of the land and the embedded cultures living on that land to recruit to the effort representatives from those who call that place home.  Such a Congress would of necessity need to be color blind and gender/sexuality deaf, it would of necessity have to discipline itself to understanding not the symptoms of the problems but rather the elements of the human dynamic that when deformed by obsolete or erroneous social (a.k.a. economic/political/techno-human interface) structures become the cause of the problems. We must treat and heal the disease, not the symptoms.

If that effort fails then the consequences of what is described above will be the exact opposite of what is desired, the United States could and would become the bastion not of freedom but of the darkest of dystopian tyrannies and the rest of the world would be well and fully justified to blow the United States off the side of the planet as soon as they figure out how.

People, we resurrected this Democracy thing from the Greeks and essentially exported it to the world, it is on us to either maintain it in the service of the original dream of freedom and dignity, or decide with a considered decision to dispose of it and try something new. This needs to happen, and we need to get it right. For our sake, and ultimately for the sake of the world as a whole.

We NEED to sit down, pour ourselves a cup of java, and THINK about the problem.