Ok ok ok, how does anyone work in social services who harbors such deep and abiding pessimism? The bible sez something about love being abiding, hopeful, and even embued with faith...of which i have precious little. There are some who figure the population and environmental degradation, the gloabl warming and increasing shortages of water, land and energy will all sort themselves out- go read Malthus, they say glibly, without seriously considering that the recent correction in population growth was due to disease and war. relax, they are saying, disease and war will sort it out. hello? those are the sorts of problems most sane people hope to avoid. then you recall these same malthusians are armchair quarterbacking the globe from the comfort of their la-z-boys, like a couple of bush administration dudes, sucking the teat of their oil stocks on this the final swell of price gouging before the gig is done and civilzation as we currently know it splutters into the mad-max future. but no, these same folks glibly proclaim, look at the exponentially growing advances in science! we will simply engineer ourselves out of these shortages. by making fuel out of water, fresh water out of reconstituted cow farts, and artificial replacement vertebrae for everyone! hooray! so just keep on consuming and shut up. if you don't like the plenty, move to africa. if you don't want to eat meat, quipped the hungarian waiter, move to romania. ha ha ha.

the most crucial question of our age, at least the 1% of us on the planet with the luxury of pondering such things from the comfort of our computers- yes, and half the world has never even used a phone, and that is at some level your problem, our problem- that most crucial question is:

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

Without this question, the door is wide open to limitless self satisfaction, which when tide to the human ego and the drive for power, status, lapdances, etc. is, hu, limitless. and i think a wise man once said that he thought freedom needed limits.

Efficiency, which encompasses that stodgy, sweater clad Carterism conservation as well as sexier technofixes and hippie-crunchy compost-and-eat-your-own-poopisms, is really the one discipline with the promise of extending the capacity of the earth to hold our burgeoning numbers.

But I stray from my original point, my abiding pessimism and lack of faith in our species, which i think principally explains my opposition to human reproduction in general. i do not believe the odds are good of the human race saving itself from self-annihilation; nor am i altogether sure we are deserving of such salvation, as a species. what makes us imagine that we are better, nobler, more deserving of survival than the species we drive to extinction? and if we acknowledge that in a spiritual sense we are peers, equals to other creatures in nature, what are we doing to check ourselves? clearly not enough. which brings me to a central idea that i think needs to be more widely accepted, to put ourselves and our actions back in perspective-

OUR SPECIES SUCKS.

i mean, as a species. not individually. because, as i say whenever i deprecate any nationality, some of my best acquaintances are black/christian/mexican/chinese. similarly, some of my closest acquaintances are human. i say this not to demonstrate i am a good liberal- i am not, i am a belligerent, independent leftie- but because any group you may find tendencies in has a bell curve of individual reality which dictates the existence of saints and sinners. crapulent backstabbers and the fantabulasticamagorical. and that is why i am in social services. the good ones out there do deserve better. and as this existence is often filled with suffering, it is our duty if we are conscious of that fact to seek to lessen that suffering among sentient beings. i say that while claiming no religion of faith, mind you- to me the greatest elements of religions are those that ring with a truth as evident and eternal as gravity and other scientifically observable phenomenon, and philosophies that grapple with these hold truths arrived at via intuition, which plays an integral role in scientific discovery, as does chaos (accident).

what am i smoking?

Browner. Stupider. Poorer. Those are the trends, in that order.

http://www.highereducation.org/reports/pa_decline/

Now, there is some causality there: undereducation leads to poverty. But there is no genetic causality between brown and stupid. I was at a white man's apartment in Auburn not long ago, and while the livingroom sported a cheesy poster of a desert-camo clad soldier praying under a US flag, the fridge bore a magnet: SHIT! I FORGOT TO GO TO COLLEGE! Would've been funny except for the roomful of uncolleged white folks with offspring. Can any educational system meet the challenges posed by our current immigration, our current fashion of deliberate stupidity, our painful legacy of slavery? Do we ever imagine US born kids will have the same drive as the kids of developing nations, who now compete for a limited pool of jobs in a global production economy? A Wal-Mart race to the bottom, which is apparently located somewhere in China?

As for cultural connections between brown and stupid, well, there is in this nation a cultural element which views any submission to the system, of which public education is a tool, as a fool's game. School promises a ticket to the white world of power, but at what price? Selling out your identity? Rejecting books, as a whole, well, that saves a man from having to challenge himself educationally to prove his worth, and leaves a lot more time for rolling blunts and talking shite. Not mutually exclusive pasttimes, but you get my drift. School as a tool of the state, a tool of cultural indoctrination, will fail to educate the black man inasmuch as it exacerbates the historical precedent of whites holding power over blacks. Power sharing is too weak a word for what I think is needed. We need an outright browner education. But how to staff such an enterprise when what most educated brown folks shoot for is the MBA and the Benz? The chickens and eggs of our history, on they go. At least some folks are trying...

http://www.seattleschools.org/schools/aaa/

does the self-esteem salve work? does connecting spirititually with a pan-africa help one compete in a world still dominated by a pan-europe? wonder how these kids will fare in later educational attainment?