Would Plato's city survive?

How can a city devoid of savagery survive through a barbarian invasion? In Plato's Greece, the fear was of such groups. Groups that had no care for philosophy or perfectly just republics, but only wanted to conquer as much as possible. Plato's proposed solution to the barbarian problem is a perfectly fit and trained warrior class. But the idea of death in Plato's society is not explained in the context of an inherent unfair nature of life, but in a natural occurrence that fits into the city's general love of order. There would be no order to savagery and the introduction of the apparent advantages of this disorder would implant themselves in the mind of the people. The people of the Republic are not taught why disorder is wrong, only that order is best. Once disorder is inevitably introduced to the people, it can only grow in influence.
I think one of Plato's major oversights is in his disregarding of the origin of vice. Vice, it seems to me, comes from a desire to avoid death and protect against risk, often overprotecting. Plato covers the protection from greed and even eliminates risk, but he does not account for his people's desire to avoid death even at the cost of others. If one in the city could realize that more food would better protect them as an individual from famine in times of drought, then that person would stockpile. Plato seems to think that famine would never reach his city. I know no place on Earth that is separate from these problems all the time. It only takes a little idea of perceived advantage to break the shield of Plato's defensive education on order. Plato's city would struggle to maintain order in face of savagery and death.

Plato's the Republic: Is Justice of Wisdom?

Plato has proved in the Republic that justice is not the interest of the stronger, the morality of the ruler, or the advantageous, but rather that justice is acting in one's own sphere and refraining from interfering in another's sphere. This definition works only in the context of Plato's republic wherein the idea of injustice, being the opposite of justice and not defined otherwise, has no place in the minds of the citizens. This kind of justice is not wisdom, but rather a kind of stagnation. Plato set out to mold a society made on the principles of justice only and not mutual advancement. The goal of Plato's society cannot be advancement because their is no understanding of gaining more than what is needed at any time. The principle of utilitarian placement of labor in society, a need of only subsistence, can only work if a society collectively buys in to that principle. Plato's society is not based on a want to destroy injustice in an already created one, but rather to create a society in which none of the citizens understand anything but their sphere.
Is this kind of society just in itself? Is it fair to deny the pursuit of knowledge and evolution to an entire populace? I don't believe it is and I don't believe it can work. I don't believe that injustice or justice are learned behavior. Humans have evolved through trial and error and the understanding of advantages. A society which contains merchants and exchange of goods and money affords opportunities for advantage to be found in these exchanges. The argument against this flaw is that the citizens of the republic will have no conception of unfairness or unfair dealings in exchange of goods. The will to be greater than others is an evolutionary maxim and cannot be taken out of a society.
And if it was, for argument's sake, is that just or good for the people of the republic? This principle denies any kind of evolution of man. The republic also does not exist isolated in the world. It will inevitably be a weak republic unless its citizens understand power. The warrior class of the republic would have to understand death and the search for a way in which to cheat death would open up avenues for injustice to creep in.
The denial of such supposed learned behaviors is not wise. It does not encourage a wise populace and it is unwise in itself. If a republic came to being such that it abided by the principle of subsistence as the only goal and everything remaining in its right place and still had an understanding of death as natural then Plato's republic could work. As it stands, Plato's just republic is unwise.

Open letter to parents

Mom and Dad, all of you,

There are two kinds of effort. A parent can show effort superficially or a parent can show effort genuinely. When a parent asks their child what kind of music they like, that's good. When the parent listens to it, hates it, and asks their child "Why do you like that hip-hop music?" The parent has gone over into the bad side of attention-giving. Parents, please give your kids space to grow, while asking them what they like, what they're doing. There is not an inherent problem in the question "Why do you like this?" but the kid will see that the parent is not happy with the kid's interests. If a parent thinks something is genuinely troubling, like a violent movie that the kid claims is his favorite, then the question "Why?" goes into the parent's job to protect their child. The problem of today's parents is not knowing what to protect their child from. I can't blame parents who are overprotective because it's really better than the polar opposite.
As much as a kid shuts their parents out, the parent has to make the effort to try to understand what their kid does and why. The parent doesn't even have to ask, just pay attention. If your child's image of you dies and is reborn in the likeness of a loser, that is normal growth for a person. But they still live with you and you can still see them doing what they want to do. Figure out why and let them do it a healthy amount of the time. Parents have a responsibility to be jerks, and I get that, but only be jerks when we kids are being idiots, to put it simply. Yes, its stupid to do a lot of things we kids do. We'll realize it eventually. Weather the storm, parents. We'll grow up eventually. Just make sure we grow up relatively healthily and pay attention. Thanks for trying.

Children, yours.

Civic duty

I've gone to church most Sundays in my life. According to my mother and father, I was a well behaved little flirt of a baby. I never cried much or made noise, but I was plenty distracting to the middle-aged envious women of the congregation. I was not annoying for the most part and people distracted themselves from mass to talk to me. Most babies are not like me. Most parents are not like mine in mass. People need to control their babies in church or stop bringing them.

When I outgrew my cuteness and demanded stimulation that couldn't be found in the attention of baby-snatchers (my mother has become one- a woman who loves babies and wants to hold every one she sees), I succumbed to the power of the coloring book. My parents knew me well enough to see that I was going to be a problem on Sundays if I didn't have something to do. Seeing as how the complexities of Catholicism were beyond my mental range, they brought coloring books. I was an aspiring comic book artist (my talent for drawing tapered off after age 6) and coloring engrossed me. In mass these days, I see an astounding lack of coloring books. People are afraid that a coloring book is disrespectful of the institution. They assume the sight of a child coloring a dove purple and green would be too distracting to prayer, so instead they allow their rambunctious little cherubs to scream at no end. These children are not filled with the spirit of the Lord, they are simply bored by Him. Parents pick up their children and stare at the priest, trying to comfort the child and still Receive the Word. What they fail to realize is that when they pick up their screeching spawn the people in the pew behind them are now faced with a temptation of mortal stature. The only way to really get anything out of going to church is to devote one's whole mind to the Word. I can only get at the lessons of the Bible when I am clear mentally. For every screaming baby, one prayer is wasted hoping that the baby will stop crying. It will not, all ye faithful.

I cherish the sight of a well-behaved baby in mass so much that it is more distracting than the screamers. This is only the case because of the screamers themselves, but it has created a lose-lose situation. The only solution for this problem is to either occupy the baby with an activity, understanding that the net total of disrespect is lower for the distracted and silent child, or to take the baby out into the front of the church until it calms down. As a parent, your first responsibility is your child. If the child is screaming you need to calm it down, but that process takes a long time more often than not. The good people of the church have gathered to hear God's message and that becomes impossible when a parent is trying too hard to multitask. Take your baby outside and calm it down. Give it a pacifier and take it back inside.

A few weeks ago, I saw a man give his kids his iphone to play with. He had a silly little game that had the kids tapping the screen when an animal came up or something to that effect. The previously ill-behaved kids shut right up and everyone in the family's minds all went back to where they should be. I'd prefer it to be a coloring book because of the artistic seed that can be planted by that route, but either way the child needs something and Jesus isn't doing it for them.

Bear in mind that I never sit in the back of church. The last time I did, my mother and I vowed that we never would again, dubbing it Pee-Wee's playhouse. At some points it became impossible to hear our priest speaking. We were unsure whether we should be standing or kneeling as the kids around us were doing both, as well as standing on the pews, running in the aisles until their irate parents shepherded them back to their places, and (my favorite) climbing over pews. They fell over into the pew in front of them and looked back for acknowledgment from their parents who had decided to ignore them. Of course this neglect prompts further displays of athletic prowess. This exemplifies the problem. Parents don't want to think about their kids during mass, but they don't know how to make it so they don't have to.

Is Poverty A Choice?

I've never known poverty in my life and I likely never will. I don't come from poverty for at least two generations and am blessed with education and enough money to live comfortably. Any view of poverty from an outside perspective will be skewed by a primitive understanding of that world. Reading "All Souls" is confirming the ideas of existentialism that we read about early in the year. What happens to an individual is a result of choices made by either the individual or factors around the individual dependent on choices made by other people. Poverty is always a result of choices made by someone. There appears to be a common misconception in the minds of the well-off and the impoverished alike, that poverty can just happen to someone as if caused by some great universal force. No one can make blanket statements about poverty as it is in one generation, one lifetime. Poverty, when it happens, can come from factors outside of the individual's control. As an illustrative example: a mother has multiple kids with a man who had a steady enough job to support the kids. The man leaves because he didn't want to be a father and realized he didn't want to support the family anymore. The mother now has to support the kids on her own, but she loses her job because the company she worked for is going out of business. She then goes looking for a job that can support her kids, but she can't find any because all around her the businesses are struggling. The family slips into poverty based on choices made by people outside of the family (the family being now the mother and the kids). The mother and the kids now have a choice to do everything they can to get out of poverty or life for the time being and live relatively comfortably in poverty. Whether or not to stay in poverty is a choice.

In "All Souls" the mother is not making choices to help the family get out of poverty. She is not saving money, no one in Southie is. This is her most obvious fault as a mother because she is not herself making the tough choice to give her kids the best chance in life. She can't afford to send her kids to better schools than the apparently awful public schools in Southie. She also hasn't instilled in her kids a desire to get out of Southie or a desire to go to school. As hard as it is to go to school in Southie, Ma made no attempt to get her kids to see that education is the only way to break the cycle of poverty.

Staying in poverty is a choice because poverty is a cycle. Families stay in poverty because of an inability to see the way out. The people in Southie became such a tight-knit community that they had a collective mindset about poverty. Southie became a dysfunctional family, kept together by their collective denial of their poverty. They all subscribe to band-aid solutions that satiate only their material desire to be greater than the black people they see in Roxbury. Any challenge in life can only be overcome when it is accepted. Denial is a repeating cycle that buries people in their own lies. No one in Southie commits to making the neighborhood better, they just want it to not be black because that is a barometer for how bad, how poor, a neighborhood can be. No one has ever gotten out of poverty by spending excess amounts of money on clothes when cheap clothes can be bought. At one point Michael Patrick Macdonald relates a time that his mother could have bough all the kids sneakers for $1.49, but the kids made her buy the better brands for more. The mother should have made the kids wear the ugly, cheap, sensible sneakers because that's what a good parent does: they make the difficult decisions that their children are not mature enough to make on their own. Instead, the mother acted immaturely in her own right by succumbing to the peer-pressure of her children. She wanted to be accepted by her kids instead of doing what is best for them. That attitude permeated Southie and is the reason the residents couldn't break the cycle of poverty.

Integration

It is a natural  human reaction to fear and perceive differences between people. It is impossible to see a person of different skin color from one's own and not understand that difference. In today's America we are, for the most part, evolved enough in our thinking that race does not cause irrational hate. However, we still see race and it is something to be overcome in interaction between people of different skin colors. When a white man talks to a black man, they both see that they are different from one another, but the initial realization that there is a barrier between them that is their skin color does not inhibit them for more than a split second. True color-blindness visually, the quality of not taking race into account in anyway by not acknowledging it, is impossible because people will always see differences first and foremost. However, we are growing closer to the color-blindness that Malcolm X learned about in Mecca wherein race does not matter because it is accepted and any cultural barriers are overcome. Malcolm X said that all races are inherently different by virtue of who they are, but this is not cause for hate of any kind.
The white man began to subjugate the black man out of fear and a desire to better his own race. The evolutionary reaction to better oneself and care for oneself above those of different qualities is the root of this behavior. The white man felt he was better than the black man, but was afraid of him because of his differences from them. So he subjugated them without considering that the men and women he came across were in fact just that, men and women. Evolutionary principles hold up between species. Differences between humans are not cause for any kind of subjugation, physical or economic.
In America today we are accepting enough of these differences that they don't matter as deciding factors. Most people in America do not care if a politician is black or white, but care about his views and ability to get the job done. We are still working towards expunging the prejudices based in race that we still hold in our minds. America has overcome racism in most areas in that people are not denied chances based on race. However, chances are narrowed by that barrier between people of different skin colors. When there is an obstacle to be overcome that can be gone around simply people choose the route of least resistance. Unfortunately that barrier is not going to go down completely because race cannot be unseen, but the barrier can be changed to the same magnitude that it has for any man, white, black, or any race.
If two men are interviewed for a job what should happen is the interviewer should notice all discernible physical characteristics initially. Candidate one: white man, well-dressed, short hair, Armani suit, etc. The details don't matter. Candidate two: black man, well-dressed, short hair, Armani suit, etc. The details matter suddenly. The white man coughs in the interview and fails to cover his mouth. Little bacterium are breeding on all of the interviewers important papers. The white man wipes his nose with his sleeve. His sloppiness is manifesting itself, but he waves it off: "I'm sick, allergies." The black man is perfect for the job, yet the decision is difficult because of the barrier. The barrier needs to be taken down so that we notice race simply as a detail, a way to see people physically, not a way to define that person's personality.
A popular example of how race is at the forefront of our minds is the story that involves a black man and it starts like this: "So I was going home today and this black guy gets on the train." Why does it matter that he is a black man? It doesn't and it has no impact on the story. There is no problem with describing people physically unless consistency is lacking. When the same person tells a story starting like this: "So I saw this guy when I was walking home today," and the man was white, the barrier is making itself manifest.
Integration is possible and already very present, but the barrier between people is not where it should be. Race is still something outside of physical description and until it means nothing more than a possibility of differences between people culturally we are not a united race, a human race. Differences of ideas and beliefs are the only differences that should separate people, physically or mentally. We may be physically integrated in America today, but our mental integration is behind because of that barrier.

Malcolm X reflection

Well shit. I'm white and my people have done some pretty awful stuff. I think that I'm having the right reaction when I feel awful initially, then analyze myself to see how I am sanity-wise.

I don't know any legitimate racists, but I can imagine. Malcolm X does an excellent job of making us understand why white people think they are better than everyone of a non-white race and how they exhibit that insane supremacy. I think that I'm also doing a good thing while reading this by not retreating to my cave (like the ALLEGORY) and listening to some Minor Threat because as unfair as it is to hate an individual for his skin color, even white devils, it's even more unfair to block out any anger against the white man. The white man deserves to feel pretty bad for a little bit, just long enough to know how wrong racism is.

I think that Malcolm X is a smarter man than the doctrine of the Nation of Islam forces him to sound. Some of the points about Dr. Yacub (whose story sounds like a hell of a sci-fi book) and women are downright not true. However, the points that Malcolm focuses on more are very important and very true. The white man, as a collective, acted like devils to the black man, which is why "devils" is the  collective term that the Nation assigns to the white man. I think that Malcolm initially did think of every white man as a "devil" and hated him for that despite his stance on civil rights. This hatred was overcome, however, by Malcolm's ability to think of the term "devil" as a way to question the white man. The purpose of using such strong language was to get people, specifically black people, to see the wrongs that the white man endorses. It creates an us vs. them mentality that is necessary for change.

Malcolm X's philosophy is a starter philosophy about change. I do not agree that two races should not be together because in the end everyone is a human being and while our races can be different and impact our cultural background in different ways, blacks and whites can live together. The problem that Malcolm X saw with integration and coexisting was that he saw no evidence that blacks that worked their way up to be legitimately on the level of whites would be accepted for who they are. When all is equal then different peoples can coexist, but when one people oppresses another to the point where the oppressed has no awareness of their culture, a major point of the Nation of Islam's goals, then there can be no benefits from integration. Malcolm X saw that this tokenism was a facade meant to pacify the black man to avoid confrontation.
Malcolm X wanted everyone to accept cultural differences and realize that we do not have to pretend to be color blind, but we can live together if we are equal. Malcolm X did not want that in his time because he did not trust the white man to keep everything equal, to act fairly.
I don't see why he would trust the white man. After all, they had acted like devils for a long time and the black man had not improved his social standing very much. I can't blame any black man in that time for hating white people, but if a black man can't get past that hate for the sake of true equality, beyond the tempting nature of revenge, then he is not acting righteously.