That's just the way the world works!: ON SOCIAL PROBLEMS TO GET YOU THINKING

We have many social problems in this country,

· Inequality has increased considerably.

· Full time employment is decreasing.

· There are many people living in poverty considering our supposed better quality of life. (A smart society would be lessening this issue)

· Youth suicide is increasing, doubling for Australian males in the last generation.

· The sense of security and safety has declined greatly. A generation ago people felt safer on the streets, were more able to leave doors unlocked, could let their children go out unsupervised. We were worried less about unemployment or being able to pay for illness or aged care.

· Incidences of anxiety, stress and depression have increased greatly, now possibly 10 – 20 times as common as it was 20 years ago. People’s lives are becoming increasingly meaningless, both at work and privately.

· Drug and alcohol problems have escalated. A generation ago there was almost no hard drug problem in Australia. Now we have a large supply industry leaving many people with ruined lives, family breakdowns, and serious problems relating to crime. These problems would hardly exist if people were not bored, anxious, deprived, stressed and discontented, or had access to healthy and supportive, collaborative communities.

· The health and effectiveness of the family unit are a growing concern. There is a high rate of family breakdown. The family and community have less influence in socialising children than they used to, compared with the media and commerce. Both parents are less often at home, and grandparents and relatives hardly get together.

· "Welfare" services provided by the state are being cut. States are slashing spending on welfare at the very time when people are becoming more isolated and insecure because of the lessening of jobs.

· Public services are deteriorating. Many public institutions and services are being cut back, eliminated or sold off, or transformed into corporations that charge unjustly that must maximise profits.

· There are too few hospitals. More than 1/3 of Americans have no health insurance. Australia is heading in the same direction of expensive private health care services for the few, and inadequate or no provision for the poor.

· There is the death of rural towns. All around the world the global economy is destroying rural life due to technology. The economy does not need many people in the countryside any longer as machines can do more. We live in a society that pays low wages for hard work, who wants to do that. Food is a cheap community and has less value than perfume and fancy clothes.

· Public life has deteriorated. Most people live only within their private world and have little to do with public affairs or cooperative activity intended to benefit their society. How many people contribute voluntarily to community working bees or committees, or regularly attend public meetings to discuss local issues?

The Government and the majority of the public think that if you throw enough money at any problem, that is the way you’ll solve it. I simply can't accept this basic theory other than they want to keep the general public thinking that they are doing the job we expect them to do. I don't believe most of our social problems can be solved by just spending money without tangible solutions. We need workable plans that collaborates everyone and every level, we need not just to respect the rights of the rich and important people, as they are not the only ones who contribute to the forwarding of life, we also need to insure the poor are contributing and feel as though they are a part of the structure.

I don't have much confidence in a lot of our social programs, as I don't think most of these so-called programs work on a large social scale. Let us investigate a few examples. Schooling; children have not been graduating from our schools with the ability to read or write properly, (I was a prime example). This has been a concern for many years, and I’d have a guess that this problem would most likely go as far back to the inception of education for social sculpting. What is the solution? The Governments solution is to raise the salaries of the teachers, and or spend lots of money on school equipment, unproven programs etc. These will work to some degree, but the real problem with our education system as a whole? In my opinion, is that it comes down to the teaching methods of the teachers, and the curriculum processes in which they are expected to educate. Teachers are only tools, just like a computer or a book. For instance, say someone writes a mathematical computer program and that program is full of inaccurate data, the person learning that program will think that what they have learned is correct, they will not know any different. i.e. 1+1=3.

Most educational programs educate children with the wrong priorities in regard to the subject of life as a whole. We basically learn nothing about general life; only history and theories, things like the theory of becoming successful (win at all costs), reaching that goal, having all you desire. A solution in preparing our children to face an ever-changing future could lie in changing some of the topics or at best including some topics such as social psychology. I believe in a strong emphasis on teaching the fundamentals of life and in the importance of social standards, ethics, and honesty, which is needed in a respectful society, not ony through school, but also into the big wide world. I don’t feel children are taught how to respond to others through proper education classes, only through teachers saying indirectly to students, don’t do this and don’t do that without any valid reasoning. We are not taught how to happily exist in a fast changing materialistic world, if we were, many would not be out trying to reach those high expectant goals and buying those things that they think will bring them happiness. We would be more content and appreciate the simple things we have if our goals were realistic. Most children, if not mentored by enlightened parents, do not even understand the basic principles of morality and compassion. Our culture is about competition and winning at all costs.

How do we solve the many social problems of our society? Let me ask some questions:

1. How do we save an alcoholic from himself?

2. How do we save a drug addict from himself?

3. Or a gambler?

4. How does one save such people from the powerful desires and forces within them that are carrying them to their destruction?

5. How do we stop paedophiles?

6. How do we help people with mental issues?

With social programs or psychological therapy

Yes, perhaps psychological therapy and social programs of the right type, based on the true understandings of the problems and where they originate from could be of some use, but I simply have little confidence in the many social programs that a growing majority seem to need (at this point we have to ask why are people breaking down more than ever). This linear and mechanistic goal setting in our immoral materialist society has forgotten to include the education of basic good sound morals, period! If people were taught good social and personal morals from the beginning, and the government and private business actually cared about people; not their egos and pockets, many of the programs that fill our society today I feel would not be needed. We simply have created for ourselves a pyramid culture where the gaps between anything are vast.

“They say a pyramid scheme is illegal, funny how almost all governments and business operate in pyramid system in some manner”

Due to all our increasing problems, the solution for people who are struggling to meet the expectations of our social arrangement in some way or another (which in the majority of cases may not be caused solely from their own choices) is to seek help from so called educated professionals. But guess what these professionals will say to someone who has been forced to need help, “I can only help you if you want to be helped”. This seems to ease the pressure of not being able to “cure” the patient if their program fails. i.e. Oh that person, too far gone for me to help them.

“I went to one Dr and they told me I had bipolar, I then went to the next Dr and they said I was ADD, they both prescribed drugs without any real understanding, what a joke”

Many so-called mental issues/disorders are made up from people who exhibit divergent thinking; they are not like the norm. A child who is quite and unheard is not called a UDD (un-intention deficit disorder). Just because you are a very clean person, does not always warrant to be labelled with derogative condition like OCD. Just because you are sensitive and in tune to your emotion senses does not justify being told you “you have a mental condition” like Bipolar. Just because you are sad does not mean you suffer from depression, you are suffering from sadness, a natural state when you are not getting what you want. There is much being written about this topic (search; The Myth of Mental Illness) and it is worth to have a read to get a full understanding of the spin people (mostly expert Dr, Prof etc) tell us to make money.

I have to ask; is learning from a text book really going to solve people’s problems on a personnel level? I don’t think it does as there are too many scenario factors that cause thoughts (good or bad). If reading could, criminals would never commit another crime again after they leave jail. They could be reprogrammed on what was right and wrong. My point here is that everyone is different and they will respond in many different ways no matter how you to assist them. How do you really know what someone is thinking or going through to be able to help them.

Is it someone’s fault they lose their job to new technologies? Is it someone’s fault they have worked for a boss that is an insecure a bully? Is it someone’s fault they were constantly bashed and or raped as a child or sexually abused at an orphanage? No, but as stressful as these original event were that contributed to their problem was, it is also their sole responsibility to seek help to try and fix a problem that wasn’t caused by them in the first place, this adding more issues into the arena. I like many have been treated unfairly by managers and this has cost me much. It would be very satisfying to me to see these people take ownership of their behaviour and have to pay for their immoral ways.

Homelessness is a major problem all over the world. How do you stop it?

I believe psychological therapy used for treating many of these addictions, depression states and other disorders is mostly a delusion. Most people just want someone to talk to, to be listened to and maybe find out there battles are similar to many. How can you get truly insightful help from someone that has not suffered themselves in anyway? To really help someone I think you need to have walked in their shoes at some point in time. Most of these so-called professionals come from good backgrounds and have never had any major setbacks in their lives. So it is for this reason that I don't think psychological therapy does some people any good, nor does it offer anything useful to the strong-minded individuals. I mean, when you really think about the visitations to see someone, its time governed and sporadic. I know, this is all we cannot afford as a society, but it’s not really set up in the best interest of the person. If we lived in a small community/family group, the help would be available at anytime.

A higher percentage of people who are not thinking in a positive or productive way, come from the underprivileged families and communities. If these people are the ones who really need the help, I must ask, how do you think these people (or society) can pay for proper psychiatric help if it costs on average $100/hour per session, and if they are allegeable for government assistance, when do they ever get to see these professionals at a time when they need to, and what quality professionals do you think these professionals are, all the good ones would not work in the public sector where the monetary rewards are at there lowest.

I think some psychiatrist’s can confuse some people more than they can help them. This is simply due to giving common problem answers from the masses they hear and from the books they have read. You don’t practically learn to drive a car from someone who has never been behind the wheel. They will be able to teach you the basic skills they have heard and or read about, but not teach from practical experience. I believe the best people who can offer help to others are the people are the non textbook trained only people. People whom have been through an experience and who have had the strength to move on and better themselves, people like: reformed prisoners, rehabilitated anorexic sufferers, drug addicts etc. This not only has the benefit of practical teaching, but also offers the confidence in that the person whom has the problems trusts the Councillor as; they have been there.

Our society has many problems. Children can become divergent in their way of thinking as they grow up through the laziness, neglect and or abuse of their parents. How do you solve this? Do you take them away from their parents? Maybe an answer would be to make future parents go through and pass practical classes about how to raise a child properly before they are allowed to have a child! (Now that would raise some eyebrows) Who decides what represents neglect or abuse? Who acts as judge? Who do you give the children to? Are you sure they will go to a better place? We know for a fact that boarding schools, yes even religious ones, and other forms of outside of family housing have been the cause of many psychological problems by way of various abuses. We have the problem of homelessness in Australia, why? We do not live in a third world country. It is concluded that there are now over 45,000 homeless children aged under the age of 25 across Australia. Of these, approximately 8,000 to 9,000 are in the 12 to 15 age group. There are estimated to be up to a further 50,000 children at risk of becoming homeless (from ABS).

On any given night in Australia, over 105 000 people are homeless. This figure does not take into account any effects that the global financial crisis and its impact on our economy, labour force and the most vulnerable in our society has had to deal with.

Most Australians are only a few steps away from becoming homeless or living below the poverty line. If we lost our job today, how many of us could guarantee a roof over our head past a few months? Census data shows that homelessness affects everyone in society for different reasons. Of the 105,000 people who experience homelessness, about 40,000 of them are young people under 25. Almost half (44 per cent) are women and just over 12,000 are children under 12 years of age, who are likely to be escaping domestic violence. About one in four people (26,790) are homeless were families with children.

Given that homeless services are already stretched to its limits, it is troubling to think how they will manage as unemployment and social problems starts to increase more and things really start to get tough. As you will read through this book, we cannot keep growing and creating jobs like we do. Once the population levels out, what are we going to be building? What work will all the construction industry do? We are heading for troubled times.

The government and minister of family affairs both agree that people should start working together about homelessness before it is too late; well I agree that we should all hold hands and help each other, and that the world be as one with everyone earning the same salary regardless of position, but this is a fallacy and out society does not work by treating people with equality...

What can be done about the homelessness? There is not a great deal as there will always be extreme polar ends as people do not like to “give up” things. Like most social issues that face us now, the problem is just too diverse and the origins too complicated to attempt to start working together to solve it. It is easier to say we need to do something than do it now. I have been hearing this since I can remember.

I’m sure I read somewhere that it costs between $200,000 and $400,000 to raise a privileged child to the age of 18, that’s more than a person on the welfare earns as a whole in that same time frame. How do you stop single women who deliberately fall pregnant in order to qualify for the welfare and who uses children as a free meal ticket? If the average cost to raise a “privileged child” is $200,000 plus; is the research proving that spending anything less on that child is below average? Is the research saying that if you cannot afford to spend that amount of money on your privileged child, expect your child to fail in life? I read it as yes in most cases.

We also have the problem of thousands of people who are unemployed and living off welfare. What is the solution? In a perfect world (a world in which the government says is achievable… joke), everyone would have a job in which they were making ample money to provide a good standard of living for themselves and their family (Prime minster Bob Hawk once said that no child will be living in poverty in 1990, what happened here, another lie to win a vote). In addition to having a job, the job would be interesting and fulfilling, the worker would be respected by their bosses and they would love going to work. If they didn't like their job, they would be given another job or easily move onto another role.

But how do you create a system that gives this kind of ideal? How do you insure that an economy can produce a rewarding and satisfying job for everyone?

Maybe as a start we should stop replacing jobs with robots and technology and the importing of cheap foreign labor. If there are not enough jobs for everyone today (with over 30 hrs a week), what do you do about the people left out without one? Let them live below the poverty line as a means of punishment? And if you start offering to many free-bees to people who have no jobs, how do you stop people who do have jobs (but dislike working for a living) from quitting their jobs and getting in line to collect these free luxuries?

When most of the jobs in our society require a certain level of education and skills, what do you do when the young students in public schools refuse to work, learn and strive for that level of achievement needed to obtain a normal life, because they know they have already got a handicap against the more affluent schools? How do the lower class citizens compete with the befits of the private education system, and the acknowledgments and accolades that these schools offer, those that end up going into their resumes? Sure as a less fortunate person (and there has been a few) you may be good, or even interested in the job you are going for, but the person whom will end up getting the job, would most likely be the person that went to such and such (better) school.

In a perfect world, animals would even live free without fear. In the real world though, they have to keep a wary eye out for the predator, or they’ll be eaten. That is just the way the world works, it’s that simple. For the week (introvert) and the unwary (uneducated), nature (society) is brutal and cruel, sometimes it is just plain evil. Just like when a mother animal kills her own young, as she senses that nature is not going to supply what is needed to raise her young (there are no free hand outs in the natural world). Although man may not always realize and except it, the same hard, unforgiving laws that rule in the natural world of wild creatures, also rule in human society, except we don’t kill our young if times are hard, even though we probably should.

Mother Nature has a way of taking care of its problems. Because most people do not totally understand nature, they see it as often harsh and cruel, but nature has a way of resolving problems very efficiently before negative actions get out of control (such as our dilemmas we ignore like over using natural resources). In the natural world for example, the overpopulation of Koalas on Kangaroo Island in the 90s was not sustainable, so nature without human intervention corrected the problem in a harsh way, meaning, the weak starved to death and the population started to decline. Nature in the end will solve the problem, no matter how big. If man cannot or doesn't solve his many problems, nature can, and will do it for him, it just becomes a matter of when.

The root of many of our modern social problems, especially those of environmental pollution, is over-population, which is all caused from greed. The earth is becoming so over-populated, populated far beyond what it can naturally tolerate, yet, we keep on breeding as if there is no tomorrow. We think everything that we take from nature is infinite, like coal, oil and forests. We think technology will always save us, this is fallacy. If we don’t solve this problem of overpopulation soon, nature will eventually solve it for us, and it will be cruel. Our forecasted situation is no lesser extent to that of the Easter Island story, other than the amount of people it will affect.

Are our social problems solvable? Many of the problems of this world are caused by the weaknesses, sins, greed of man and the unwillingness to learn from the many past mistakes. But even if you could completely transform all humanity and make everyone good, caring, just, honest, educated and perfect in character, would the world stay, just, fair, caring and honest and without misery? I think the world today is so falsely calculated and so fake that it is not possible to have a society without injustices and hurt because there will always be the weak and strong and good and evil.

What about all the heartache arising from such things as natural disasters (droughts, floods, tsunamis). These losses to human society cannot be controlled by human intervention other than by reducing population to reduce the tragedy. This solution is to easy, but it is way to immoral for most to even suggest it (we would rather see a young child starving to death, to week to walk, too ill to eat than stop this from even happening through mass birth control strategies). We would rather overreact to terrorism than over react to thousands dying each year to malnutrition. But in a way we are all killing people each day through neglect and greed, but we prefer to conveniently ignore this fact. There is enough wealth to proved for everyone, yet those who have wealth do not wish to give it away.

The visions we see on our TV showing starving children in Africa is a prime example of how overpopulation causes grief. No one really thinks about why these people are starving, most people just put it down to that the country has no money. Money, does not solve problems like this, and in the end, no matter how much money we give this country to reduce the famine, the truth is that the country, the land, cannot support that amount of people. Even if we could help these people now at their current numbers, and give them a good supply of food etc to feed everyone, I would say the population over a few years would increase again to a point that was not sustainable, because these peoples will just keep expanding their population to what they are receiving in aid Both having more children and less children dying). So then it becomes a question of how do they educated/help themselves to better their farming techniques and also reduce the population by way of capping with a one child per family rule just like China (something that goes against capitalist thinking).

Through the ages, many intelligent, well-intentioned, caring people have tried to develop and create social and economic systems that they felt would be more just and fair than any other before them. But all of these people have had weaknesses and shortcomings in their way of social thinking. They didn’t realise that the majority of people just don’t care and are self focused. We all watch TV and or read the news papers, and we see the problems every day. The ones who care can do little, so they have to learn not to care, and that’s the problem in why so many don’t care, the world has become too big, and its problems have become to immense, to hard and unsolvable. It’s just unethically easier to forget about these issues and turn a blind eye and live for today. Reflection and change take much effort, effort many cannot afford or wish to grant.

Everything in our world of greed seems to be coming to a quick and unhappy ending due to all the frustration and wrongdoings of mankind. There seems to be just too many everyday problems that are being avoided and pushed aside, which, as I have said before, is why the Government just throws money around, it’s easier. Most people think that by seeing that the government is spending x amount of money on something, something must be getting done, right! Wrong. An example of this is, every time there is an election, what does the government say they are going to better, jobs, schooling, health and housing (the basics they cannot even get right). For 20 years (since I can remember) politicians have been saying this, yet still today they are still saying that they will grant this amount of money to solve the problem.

Everywhere you turn today, there seems to be increasing sadness, hurt, pain, disrespect, lying, cheating, dishonesty, bulling, crime, abuse, environmental damage, uncaring, neglect, cruelty, race discrimination and hate.

So back to the question; is it possible to create anything even close to a moral social or economic system? I think it could be possible, but it’s very unlikely and very much too late. We needed to wake up, we needed to stop the greed a long time ago, but the cancer has grown and is now incurable without drastic measures.