April 7, 2007

To the Editor

Time Magazine

Dear Reader:

Sen. Bill Bradley was a fine senator and tried the best he cold to instill morals and solutions through government. I believe he provides good questions in his op-ed piece on page 130 of the April 9, 2007 edition.

I present a slightly different view of the problem covered and some answers Sen. Bradley seeks.

1. We are not a nation of "can’t do" people. We are a nation of "don’t-have-to-do" people: we are rich enough to have other people do our work. In fact, that’s what makes you wealthy: other people doing your work who make less than you do.

2. Historically other wealthy societies experienced the same attitudes as they grew wealthy. Some survived the wealth, others didn’t.

3. Our education system failure is not the failure of the education system, but rather the understanding of the students that they have a serious job: learning. In most cases, you learn in spite of school. Everyone espouses family importance in learning, too.

4. Which raises the question of what is a family? Is a family’s responsibility to their children to be a virgin, drug-free, sober and home at 9 until they graduate? Could the lack of parental time be responsible for the perceived lack of the education system? Is it ok for a school to be a baby-sitter? Of course we can have good schools. Just everyone is so rich only few care. The ones who care do better, but then, who cares. Isn’t it easier to change the tests so we pretend we are succeeding?

5. Sen. Bradley claims Americans should be open, generous, expansive, forward-looking, creative, egalitarian, and optimistic. Unfortunately, this only describes intellectuals, or as the right-wingers label, liberals.

6. The label right-wing means something very different to Sen. Bradley than to the right-wingers themselves. The lack of gray areas right-wingers see confuses Sen. Bradley as a typical intellectual. Only black and white exist; right or wrong; good or evil. Sen. Bradley suggests we put America ahead of party. That’s not the issue on the right-wing side. It’s more like: can we put our loyalty group ahead of the country? This is expressed in two ways.

7. Method one is the religious structure. Religion creates the most important loyalty groups. Those that reject the loyalty group, for any reason, are labeled as evil. Since the opposition – remember there is no middle ground – can be told anything to defeat them truth is not important, only conquering the disloyal person or group.

8. The remainder of the warrior groups are the ones who believe God has sent them to this earth to build and own and not be interfered with by liberals who have a bad habit of not wanting to fight and just wanting to argue forever about things that make the country a loser. These right-wingers have no idea how to solve real problems other than conquering and dominating. Any negotiations lead to losing. And if the liberals win, the right-wingers must lose. Liberals tend to think there can be win-win solutions. Warriors find this thought annoying.

9. Liberals’ loyalty group is the U.S. Constitution, which expressly protects intellectuals against warriors. The framers of the Constitution saw the problems warriors cause when they are in charge. They make things intolerable on both the personal freedom and economic flow due to bad management. Knowing this, the Constitution allows for revolutions without violence. This way the government can alternate between very nasty warrior politicians that will always create a crisis with their management and the intellectuals who right the country now and again.

10. The Constitution also specifically prevents the warriors from using bullying, lying, cheating, and violence to dominate the intellectuals. To warriors this makes no sense as it interferes with the plain fact they won and why should anyone tell them what to do: Conquering is conquering.

11. Being bold enough to tell the truth will get nowhere with most of the population. Many intellectuals are too busy and the warriors do not understand what the truth is talking about. Leaders need to present a future that sounds like the truth. Reagan did this future envisioning – without any substance -- and it won an election. After all, every truth in congress gets a pork-barrel attached anyway.

12. History has shown us public funding is not a solution to politics.

13. A longer voting period is interesting. I’m sure the idea of a Tuesday election day was to keep the wrong people from voting. Democracy may not be so egalitarian as idealists’ desire. And no matter who gets in, the idea of a paternalistic management of society is really what people want; not allowing a government that is more concerned with its own loyalty group benefits than the society as a whole and the future of the society.

14. Projecting the previous century of American power into the future is also a bad thing to do. I would have supposed Europe looked at the U.S. last century the same way we look at Asia today. Europe fought themselves into almost total destruction leaving the U.S. as the sole wealthy country in the world. Those days are over as well as the idea we can fight and conquer any people that do not agree with us. This is a difficult concept for warriors.

15. As long as warriors are in charge of how we handle health care the idea of "it’s too bad if you are a loser" will be the dominant theme. The fact that the drug companies are the victors is not important to warriors; just they won, and by any means winning is ok. Warrior politicians have no pity or sense of paternalism to losers. They do not recognize we are all connected, as Sen. Bradley desires, but rather living a contest. In fact, the contest is more important than the results. Warriors prove they are "men" by fighting, not by winning. Liberals prove they are "men" by solving problems without fighting, which certainly annoys warriors.

16. The "ethic of responsibility" cannot exist outside the loyalty group for the warriors. This would mean to many loyalty groups aiding evil.

17. Interesting enough, Sen. Bradley reiterates the liberal philosophy of collective action and respect for many opinions. Warriors do not have any of these concepts in their perceptions. The only collective action is that of defeating evil. All other actions mean evil will win. Individuals are not allowed to make their own decisions, whether to make things better or not, as this would challenge the loyalty group. We see this even between right-wing groups: some want to interpret the Bible as making us tend the earth through being green, while others see this as individual decisions that will ruin the relationship with God.

18. Liberals tend to see things as needing tending and to solve problems as they arise. Warriors need to have much more security in their daily life, finding decision making difficult and, in many cases, evil.

19. Most people, don’t see health care as a crisis. They have it and don’t understand why we are arguing about it. The people who don’t have health care are losers. No warrior wants to be a loser and to them there is no problem. Of course, liberals want the warriors to accept there is a problem and cannot understand why the warriors don’t understand. To a liberal it is obvious. To a warrior it is too complex. After all, they conquer and that’s the end of the story.

20. If Sen. Bradley and the liberals want to implement winning strategies as in the concluding paragraph of the article, they better learn how to bring the warriors to their side. This is not done by talk and logic. After all, the Bible has everything you need and that is the end of their logic. It’s a question of proper leadership. I like to think of it in very direct terms: as a liberal, can you carry Kansas?

21. Being optimistic from a liberal point of view just isn’t the same from the warriors’ point of view. That’s why the founders wrote a Constitution: to protect the liberals from the bullying and fighting the warriors need to prove who they are. In fact, Christianity was developed to control warriors (as well as help them conquer other civilizations). What should the liberals come up with to control warriors in the modern world? That’s what Sen. Bradley is really discussing. Warriors will never come up with solutions that don’t involve fighting and winner/loser situations.

22. I wish all the liberals all the luck in the world. I’d rather win.

Richard Pearlman