Racism’s real damages are inflicted below the surface.

Generations are subjected to cultural water-boarding,

Billions of good people, especially children,

worry that long-term lies about their inferiority include grains of truth.

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John Donne’s  “Meditation XVII“

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Substantial History of Diverse People Thriving Together on your Land

To Ukrainians and “Russian” Ukrainians, Tartars, Cossacks, Greeks, Armenians, Romanians, Poles, unnamed communities including religious, remember there’s real history of diverse peoples thriving together on your land.

Reptile, insect, and primate natural histories show that controlling territory is vital and disruptive. The powers and benefits gained by territorial control are rarely shared equally by resident peoples. The cultural tectonics’ fostering humanity’s thousands of ongoing, festering, and bloody land claims are easy to compile. Yet there’s a real success story here.

Success Story

Billions of Homo sapiens are willing to peacefully coöperate with previously unknown or disrespected neighbors in our global hood. A message for Sri Lanka, Korea, India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Rwanda, Belgium, Spain, USA, and China (every nation) is to remember how civilization at its best demonstrates muscular progressive capacity for diversity to flourish in its midst.

The Crime in Crimea

The crime in Crimea is forgetting humanity’s frequently demonstrated capacity to redefine neighborhoods, and then get along. The territorial crisis in Ukraine, along with many others, can be peacefully resolved.

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“Until the late nineteenth century the question of woman’s ability to profit from or even survive higher education was controversial. Vassar College opened in 1865 was often described by its first president as an experiment.… as late as 1871 an MD at Harvard Medical School published a book on the dangers of higher education for girls, he doubted the achievement was worth the cost from their psyche and procreative powers.”

From: Carl N Degler, In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1991

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Female divinity was driven from shared eminence in the Western world by around 500 A.D. How did this happen? The likeliest explanation is brute force. Consider that male domination of civilization may be a direct result of larger body size and physical strength. According to a U.N. report on the status of women in 2000, one in three females is beaten or sexually abused in her lifetime. Does this fact offer a fundamental clue about the source of earthly power?

Good News for Modern Man

Here’s the good news. Slowly but surely, women are gaining a fairer share of power in civilization. Many tribes and nations are moving closer to accepting the principle that the genders are entitled to equal rights and privileges before the law. Women are gaining ground in the leadership of government commerce and even religion. Consider the following list of currently serving elected national leaders:

Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany
Portia Simpson, prime minister of Jamaica
Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia
Johanna Sigurdardottir, prime minister of Iceland
Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, president of Argentina
Yingluck Shinawatra, prime minister of Thailand
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia
Laura Chinchilla, president of Costa Rica
Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh
Dalia Grybauskaite, president of Lithuania
Kamala Persad-Bissessar, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago
Iveta Radicova, prime minister of Slovakia
Atifete Jahjaga, president of Kosovo
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark

Add to this list millions of hired and appointed women who lead globally and locally in every kind of human endeavor, famously including Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s democracy leader; Sonia Gandhi, leading India’s Congress Party; and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who we hope is helping to shepherd us into a global economic recovery.

In the past, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Philippines, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Guyana, Latvia, Panama, Finland, Indonesia, Serbia, Liberia, Chile, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Lithuania and Kirgizstan have all elected female heads of state. Five of the world’s most populated nations, China, Russian, Nigeria, the United States, and Japan, have so far not elected a woman president or prime minister.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

The world population of men and women is currently almost equal. How will humanity be affected as more women gain and exercise their right to vote? American women gained the right to vote less than 100 years ago. More women voted than men in the U.S. 2010 congressional elections (46.2 percent compared with 45 percent of eligible male counterparts).

Celebrating Gender Alliance

Human gender alliance is naturally grounded and barely subject to the shifting tides of cultural history. Two-gender strategy has provided millions of life forms with survival solutions for more than 100 million years. Gender alliance might be described as life’s most successful strategy in nature. Surely human conversation about gender is informed by the fact that more than a million versions of gender alliance exist in the world today. Gender equality is one of civilization’s revolutionary developments.

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Previously we wrote that civilization resembles a placenta, because it protects and nurtures life. The placenta is a temporary organ that transfers oxygen and nutrients from mother to child, removes wastes including carbon dioxide, and shields the fetus from the mother’s immune system. The placenta is rich in blood vessels and provides a reservoir of blood for the fetus, delivering blood to it in emergencies.

Civilization is an approximately 10,000-year-old social placenta sustaining us by transferring nutrients to 7 billion people. Healthy civilization includes toilets and green technology, which control and remove environmental wastes including carbon dioxide. Successful civilization protects us from natural calamities and societal collapse. Civilization truly is a two-way conduit between humanity and nature.

A reader responded to the previous post: “This analogy does not hold. The placenta is merely a conduit. Civilization not only sustains but also shapes humanity. The placenta plays no role in shaping a child.”

Recently researchers in Britain and the United States demonstrated that the placenta actually does play an active role in human development. In Scientific American, Claudia Kalb reports that “The placenta does more than nourish offspring in the womb – it actively shapes brain development, … actively protects the fetus and shapes neurological development. … It is the placenta – not the mother – that provides the hormone serotonin to the fetus’s forebrain early in development. … Placental abnormalities could directly influence the risk of developing depression, anxiety and even autism.” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fetal-armor

The nearly 4,000 placental mammals currently in existence include dogs, cats, elephants, whales, primates, cattle, horses, rats, sheep and humans. Genetic research suggests that the evolution of the human placenta can be traced back to the earliest multicellular organisms. We bear our young live after nourishing them for varying periods of time in their mother’s uterus. We are Mammalia.

The connection between humanity and the nutritional abundance of our sacred planet is as indispensable as the placental connection between a mother and her child.

Defend Civilization

The placenta has been described as the only disposable organ ever made. Civilization is also disposable. Numerous pathologies can affect the placenta, and numerous pathologies, including terrorism, racism, poverty and war, affect civilization.

A Declaration of Interdependence makes sense for 21st-century humanity. Just as the placenta secretes Neurokonin B to protect the fetus from attack by the mother’s immune system, humanity needs to expand and enrich the conduits of cooperation, protecting civilization from ourselves. If the connection between humanity and civilization fails, our descendants will have no more chance of survival than a fetus disconnected from its placenta.

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Many claiming they have no interest in history are attentive to the sixth-century A.D. predictions of Nostradamus and the fifth-century B.C. Mayan prophecies. If the treasury received $5 every time the media mentioned one of these historic fantasies, our national financial crisis would be resolved.

The Erie Canal

In a time when civilization sometimes feels like a dangerous gamble, it makes sense to remember and celebrate historic successes like the Erie Canal that exemplify our capacity to improve human circumstances. Civilization’s success stories are less dramatic than Nostradamus’s cataclysms, but they have the advantage of being based on facts.

In 1800, the biggest obstacle to national development was the Appalachian mountain range, which made it impossible to move bulk freight such as corn and wheat from the heartland to the East Coast. Mountain roads were rough, long and scarce. The Mohawk River Valley, a channel between the Catskills and the Adirondacks, was the only natural passage through the Appalachians from Alabama to the St. Lawrence River. The Erie Canal was routed through it.

The project’s cost was unprecedented. Private developers tried to build the canal and went bankrupt. A delegation of New Yorkers appealed to President Thomas Jefferson for federal support. Jefferson called the project “a little short of madness” and “said to come back in 100 years because the project would bankrupt the nation let alone the state,” according to Wikipedia.

New York Governor De Witt Clinton took up the cause; he was mocked. But in 1817 Clinton persuaded the New York Legislature to appropriate $7 million.

The canal became one of the most incredible success stories in American history when it opened eight years later. Freight expectations were exceeded immediately. The canal provided a navigable connection between the upper Midwest and Western Europe via New York City, which became America’s leading city, surpassing other Atlantic coast ports including Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

The canal opened large areas of the American frontier to settlement and economic development and drastically cut transport costs. New York is called the Empire State primarily because of this unique connection through the Great Lakes to the Midwestern heartland.

What lessons can we derive from this story?

– Keep national and state government strong. There’s so much anti-government talk these days, it’s easy to forget that both the Erie Canal and the U.S. Constitution were incredibly successful government projects.

– Take advantage of ideas and developments from every nation. The Erie Canal project was inspired by a successful canal project in Britain and was completed using technology developed by the Dutch. Most of the workers were German-Irish and Scotch-Irish immigrants.

Many historic successes came as a complete surprise. Civilization is about identifying and developing natural advantages. There is reason to be hopeful.

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People who excuse exaggerations, distortions, omissions and flat-out lies because all sides do it are wrong. Remember the oath: “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” Do we the people have the right to expect our political leaders to tell the truth?

When leaders place party loyalty, commitments to donors and wing politics ahead of facts, and the people allow them to get away with it, the social health of our nation is endangered. Nothing threatens democracy more than a climate that tolerates dishonesty.

Now is a good time to remember and revere Peter Zenger, a German-American New York newspaper publisher who in 1734 was arrested and charged with “seditious libel,” on the authority of a royal governor whom he’d criticized. After eight months in prison, a jury acquitted Zenger because “a statement, even if defamatory, is not libelous if it can be proved.”

Decisions by the people’s representatives, including the courts, in Washington, D.C., and state capitals impact our nation’s future as much as decisions made by generals in war. How would you feel if the military leaders in charge of your children misrepresented reconnaissance because it contradicted their party line? An officer who refused to work with all wings and the center of his or her army would be discharged.

One-Winged Birds Can’t Fly

National leadership is no party game. Political leaders outrank military leaders in America. Shouldn’t it worry us that so many of our political leaders are regularly accused of half-truths and omissions? Patriotic citizens need to spend more time visiting fact-checking websites, including those accused of favoring the “other side,” just to make sure they’re hearing the evidence.

Dostoyevsky wrote, “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” Too many sincere patriots are living in “like-minded echo chambers,” eager for the other side’s distortions to be exposed, yet ignoring exaggerations propagated by their own wing.

To whet your appetite for the truth, visit the Wikipedia site called List of Common Misconceptions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions. There, you’re sure to find something you believe that is wrong. And here’s a partial list of fact-checking sites: http://www.factcheck.org/, http://snopes.com/, http://www.politifact.com/.

While it’s difficult to determine the truth about complex issues facing humanity today, it’s a citizen’s duty to try.

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