Changing the world forever for better

CALLED TO LEARN WHAT, HOW?
by Eric Chaet

I was raised in what I now realize was a sort of refugee camp, in which most men were employed elsewhere, and brought home money, and most women shopped, cooked, cleaned, and “raised” children in various ways and with varying degrees of success.

No one called our neighborhood a refugee camp. I am calling it a refugee camp, now.

Most refugee camps must be similar, though in most that are reported on, nearly all the people are dependent on charity, which is always scanty in relation to the need.

Modern ghettos are violent refugee camps. It’s hard to become a competent adult, in the midst of unpredictable violence.

There are also native American Indian reservations for the descendents of the losing side of wars of more than a hundred years ago all across North and South America. The wars were far from just, as is bitterly obvious to the inhabitants of the reservations.

Also, there are prisons and prison camps inhabited by people of varying degrees of guilt and innocence — perpetrators and victims. There are people of varying degrees of guilt and innocence also outside of prisons and prison camps.

There are schools that are bad to one degree or another, in various ways. Probably every school is bad in one way or another, and some children will suffer more than others, immediately or long-term or both.

It’s different but similar for children raised among relatively or fabulously prosperous adults who are narrow-minded, or shallow, hypocritical, self-satisfied, maybe pathologically inconsiderate or controlling, willfully ignorant, bigoted, mean — unwilling or unable to face reality, or to live up to what humans are capable of — and modify their behavior accordingly.

Everyone is like this, some times, in some ways. And it’s hard to modify your behavior, especially if you have been behaving certain ways for a long time.

My calling, which I didn’t dream up, is to transform the way at least a critical mass of humanity thinks and behaves, in such a way that no one else must have to emerge from circumstances as unhelpful, unjust, crazy, and dangerous as those from which I have had to emerge — or worse.

The need to emerge truly competent — and obstacles to emerging — don’t end, until death.

As it happens — again, I didn’t dream this up — when I understand, I am relatively good at communicating. So, I must do what I must do, mainly, by understanding and communicating.

Others are called by their circumstances and potentials to develop themselves and do otherwise. But toward the same goal — just behavior; loving kindness; ability to provide for self and for others, too, more than needing for others to provide for us; seeking to know what is true, and to live up to the way the world really is — and what the best humans we are aware of have taught and done.

On this basis, we cooperate.

If we cooperate, other problems, such as weather and climate and pathogens and corruption and misunderstandings of all sorts and violence — and supply-chain disruptions and inflation and addictions and unscrupulous candidates for office (or in office) — and even psychopaths willing to start wars in order to gain and keep personal power and privileges — can be successfully whittled down to manageable size — tamed or incapacitated.

Each one is called on to develop him- or herself toward competent cooperation.

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–Wrightstown Article #7 © Eric Chaet 2022, used in The Wrightstown Area (Wisconsin, USA) “Spirit,” by permission. Consider sponsoring #8, the way you might sponsor a prize hog at the county fair. Eric Chaet can be contacted intermittently at chaetsarticles at gmail dot com. The excellent librarians at the Wrightstown branch of the Brown County Library can help, if you need help to use email.