Perception and Reality

This is a topic that comes up a lot for me.  My mind is the product of 68 years of whatever input I have crammed into my life.  It is filtered by all the things that were there when the new input arrived and somewhat impaired by a hearing loss.  With that said, my perception is my reality.  It often takes a "Significant Emotional Event (SEE)" to change what is there.   The same can be said about a lot of us and no amount of education can or will change that unless it is accompanied by a SEE.

Having served in combat way back in the 60's, my perception is that peace is good and war is bad.  The problem is that a significant portion of the world thinks that their SEE is war to enable changes.  In some cases, what they want is hampered by unintended consequences.   I think it was Admiral Yamamoto  of the Japanese Navy that said, "I fear we have woken the sleeping giant" when the bombed Pearl Harbor.  His SEE woke us up to the fact that we needed to get into the fight in Europe and the Pacific to bring the world to a more right place. 

A good friend posted on Facebook today that in her perfect world, there would be no wars and no hate.  I agree that if I had all the power in the world that would be so.  The problem is that a whole bunch of people don't agree.  How a group of people can hijack a religion and make it the basic formulae for hate just boggles my mind.  How another religion can set limits that even their own clergy can't meet and make it universal is beyond me.  The same can be said that there are a lot of people that want smaller Government and then want to apply religious restrictions on my actions.  How can we have anti abortion and separation of Church and State?

I had a discussion with a person today in another Facebook post that challenged the way schools teach.  He wanted to measure the results of an alternative teaching method by the standards that I personally find offensive.   Where do the people in charge of the education of our children come up with what they should learn?  Where is the feedback loop to the society that says these are the things that make up success in the end.  It should come to no surprise that the aircraft industry is leaving Kansas when there is no one coming out of the school pipeline capable of running machine tools that can make the parts for airplanes.  (That is somewhat and exaggeration but mostly true)  What does it say that we measure the success of teachers and the brick and mortar schools by standardized tests? 

What I am saying here is that we don't need to throw all the bathwater out with the baby, or something like that.  What we do need to be able to do is to be willing to talk about change and what it means.   Clearly, if you do what you did, you get what you got.  I sense a lot of people aren't satisfied with what we have been getting.  Are you happy with the Status Quo? 

Does something smell in here?

MUD