What Now!?!

Here I am having completed a tedious but necessary task - a bit more onerous than cleaning your teeth, yet more satisfying than washing the dog - when I take a break to check out my tabled email. So I open up an apparently innocuous update on various public good foundations and organizations and what do I see:

"The National Geographic Society has announced an expanded partnership with 21st Century Fox that includes the sale of National Geographic magazine and other media properties to a for-profit entity."
[Philanthropy News Digest.support-b941fycbfbtsg6aupky9rbys5bbk97@e.foundationcenter.org Copyright © 1995-2015, the Foundation Center. All rights reserved. Permission to use, copy, and/or distribute this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes without fee is hereby granted provided that this notice and appropriate credit to the Foundation Center is included in all copies.]

I include the citation in the body of this blog so you can check it out for yourself - because I'm guessing you can't believe it, either.

They go on to say it's just the magazine and other publications/media that's being sold for $725 million to the Fox-in-the-philanthropic-fowl-sanctuary, not the philanthropic society. Just our favorite magazine.

That's all.

That's enough.

Co-operation

The goal of the co-operative economic model is to have both parties to a financial exchange benefit equally. Capitalists will tell you that is their goal as well, but they are being less than forthcoming. In practice, one side of the capitalist exchange benefits and the other gains something perceived to be vital by giving up something much, somewhat, or slightly less vital. “Vital” here being defined as something needed for perceived 

well-being – if only for the moment. By definition, the exchange is unequal. Imagine my surprise – having arrived at that conclusion - when I figured out that Capitalism always benefits the rich to the detriment of the poor.

After I got over the shock, I became a co-operator.

The co-operative model works. Not because it appeals to our sense of justice or our concern for the good of the community. We mostly don't have any of that when it comes to money. It works for two reasons:

* A few of us are idiot enough to be proponents of social justice and to see long-term benefit to ourselves in it;

* The rest of us of us have, from earliest childhood, a solid sense of “No fair!” that covers the loss of any privilege deemed beneficial.

Some of us have parents who point out that “No fair!” should cover all parties and that we must share in this fairness deal. Some have parents who think that's a load of crap and it's every man for himself (and sometimes he helps the women, too). The latter group may seem to dominate, but maybe not. Popularity of the various interpretations of “No fair!” seems to vacillate over the decades. The point is, it's always defined somehow.

When things get tough, which they always do, the (initially few) proponents of social justice are right there waiting to tell the rest of us how co-operation is the path to fairness. And, as it turns out, if things are really tough (which they always are, eventually) helping each other succeed financially is reasonably fair for the 99 percent. And when things, ultimately, get worse than that, everyone in the 99% pretty much agrees that the 1% can go attempt to procreate without benefit of partner.

The only real question (in my mind, because I can only hold one question in mind at a time) is how far this current economic disaster of Capitalism will continue to destroy large mammals before the ship rights itself and will it be too late for most large mammals?

I wouldn't care about this question - my mind is cluttered enough already - if it weren't for the fact that my progeny and all my offspring-by-marriage are, themselves, large mammals.

Hopefully, that isn't a problem for you.

About Whom Do We Care?

OK. Yeah, nobody uses that "proper" form of avoiding the prepositions you shouldn't end a sentence with. But it's nice to reminisce. That's what you do as you get older. The "you" in this case being me. Who knows what you two do?

So I've been reminiscing about the olden days when people were nicer, kinder.

Only I can't recall exactly when that was.

Was it in ancient China when the dynasties had everything organized and torture was a fine art that... OK, maybe not ancient China.

Was it in the Middle Ages when Christianity was spreading throughout the known world (that is to say the world known to the Romans)?  Not if you read your Ivanhoe it wasn't.

Was it in the great days of the spread of Islam. Well, if you were male and on the winning side, maybe. Or lucky enough to be one of the widows of conquered rulers that Mohammed married. But anyone else, not so much.

Was it more recently, in the United States in the 1950's, like my old fogie friends on Facebook seem to think? Back when lynching African Americans was a popular white Christian activity, various children were treated obscenely and not heard, and no woman in her right mind admitted to having been raped. Well, I guess not for everyone, at any rate.

So maybe this is it; this is the nicer, kinder time.

But I'm not so sure we don't have some room for improvement.  I'm not sure we all agree about whom we should care about. To coin a phrase.

Now, at this point, all of you politically correct folks who are offended when humor is used to mock the apparent excesses of some identifiable-with-one-word group the members of which are currently living, please stop reading and get to some serious and politically correct endeavor. The following is not guaranteed to conform to anyone's notion of inoffensive observations.

I don't call myself a Christian because too many people have given it a bad name.

My Christian heritage is also the proud heritage of some very devout people who would force a 14-year-old to have her baby after she was raped by Uncle Willie but not lift a finger to help her and said baby when her parents kick her out because they don't believe her that it was Uncle Willie.  It seems unfair to me that the devout Christians get the warm glow and the 14-year-old gets the blame when her kid doesn't turn out so well.

My Christian heritage is also the proud heritage of people in group A who think they have the right to make rules for the people in group B about whom they can love, or whom they can get away with loving not-so-consentually, or whom they should hate unreservedly, or whom they should incarcerate, or whom they should have a legal right to shoot, and so on.

And of people in group C (for Capitalist) who have rules about whom they can cheat legally so that they can screw all the other good Christians in town, especially the non-white ones, as long as they do it financially, and be pillars of the community because of it. I won't go into what kind of pillar that would be.

So my question is, about whom do we care?  How many whoms does it take to give us the good name we humans expect we should have? Whom is in charge of that?