Subject: Letter to the Editor
Date: Sunday, March 25 2001
The following letter was sent to the Tulsa World, the NY
Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and USA Today on 3/25/01.
Shannon Thompson
To the Editor:
We wonder why children are killing each other at school,
why drug abuse, violence and poverty persist. Is this a failing on the pan of
the individual or is our social organization flawed? Are the basic tenets of
our society aggravating and inciting the worst impulses in us?
We say that the economic rules that we operate under are
'fair' to all that participate, yet human rules have nothing to do with
fairness. They are mechanisms whereby one is selected to win over another based
on the differences between them. Just as the goal in basketball selects the
taller player to win and the racing of horses selects the lighter rider to win,
so too, do our economic rules select some to win and some to lose. Even more
disturbing is that the very wealthy in society are selecting themselves to win
in what is, essentially, a rigged competition.
Western culture has, through its economic, political and
religious beliefs, established countless rules dividing winners from losers
based on sex, race, age, appearance, intellect, heredity, affiliation and
wealth itself. Yet we repeatedly fail to consider these inherently divisive and
conflict-ridden mechanisms as the cause for the misery and suffering that we
experience. We have become addicts of our own social devices and an addict
never questions how the good stuff is gotten.
Human society can never adequately address the problems
it faces without questioning the fundamental tenets that it is based upon. If
we believe that these principles are 'correct' and without fault then the
burden lies upon the individual to adapt to the system rather than changing the
system to accommodate the individual. The individual is at fault, not the
system, so the individual must be educated, contained and corrected. Instead of
society serving humanity - humanity serves society.
It is time for us to consider that the basic mechanisms
of society that our ancestors created thousands of years ago are the cause of
the problems we experience. They may have appeared to be solutions at the dawn
of civilization but our immaturity at that time must have surely distorted our
thinking and prevented us from developing wise and responsible social
understandings.
Humanity does not need more rules to 'solve' its
problems. We need to consider what caused us to create rules in the first
place.
Sincerely,
Shannon Thompson
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