Re-Inventing Ancestors (standard:Editorials, 687 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Nov 07 2008	Views/Reads: 3829/3	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Up to the middle of the 20th Century, family traditions were good enough as a guide to the mysteries of life. Well, now it's a new Century and tradition no longer works. You have to re=invent your own father and mother !!!

Re-inventing Ancestors 

All "children" must learn -- from the outset -- to re-invent their
parents. 

The earlier this is done, the less conflict will such a child have to
resolve internally.  In order to do this, the child must be equipped 
with tools for discriminating among (A) parental values (where 
long-term influence is often the rule; (B) values of the local external 
culture, (which is much richer and more transient than yesteryear); and 
(C) values adopted from more distant cultures on this planet. 

When parental survival has been nourished by all nature, and there is
modest but adequate opportunity for a child to enrich its existence 
through all the senses, the child needs tools to distinguish between 
actions that contribute to survival and  other actions that provide 
intense instant gratification but have long-term destructive 
consequences. 

Two barriers arise here: 

1. Very often, it becomes folklore that given acts or behaviors are
reprehensible and must be suppressed.  In reviewing the consequences of 
this suppression, it is clear that historically, humans have compiled 
elegant and informative histories of making the same error again and 
again.  And repeating this ad infinitum. 

2. The other barrier is instant gratification for an emotional boost.  
This, too has its merits and drawbacks. 

At what point in a child's development is it most useful to provide the
needed tool, so the child can choose and emulate parental values that 
provide long-range enrichment and contribute to survival, comfort, 
fulfillment and meaning?  Where is the companion tool so the child can 
recognize arbitrary, trivial, erosive and damaging parental behavior 
and consciously reject this threat to survival, comfort, fulfillment 
and meaning? 

Since the same arguments apply to local and world populations as well as
to individual siblings, I need not belabor this point. 

This second tool the child needs is imaginative resources that can be
built, block by block, into new tools for new value systems that 
transcend parental, sibling, local, transient and world cultures as 
they continue to evolve during the 21st Century.  This kind of a tool 
enables the child to "invent" its own ancestors with a passion and a 
fervor that will carry it joyously through each living second of its 
250-year lifespan, until the cell-blueprints have drifted too far from 
ideal. 

The twin goals of survival and fulfillment are among many other human
needs that must be met.  Here is an example of one challenge:  Many 
machines have become available to us over the past few centuries This 
trend may well continue for some time into the next century.   It takes 
many workers to maintain the machines (autos, appliances, etc.).  This 
occupies time for serving the needs of the machine.  The proliferation 
of machines during the 20th Century alone occupies an enormous amount 
of time and effort for extracting and processing raw materials, 
exploiting crops and distributing them all over the surface of the 
planet. 

In order to generate the immense physical volume of machines needed for
human use, armies of human workers were once occupied in manufacturing 
these machines, in harvesting crops, in transporting goods by land, sea 
and air.  During the latter part of the 20th Century, the simpler tasks 
of many workers were taught to many kinds of automated, 
decision-making, electronically programmable machines (essentially, 
robots) and the human workers who performed these tasks are being 
replaced by more machines. 

Consequently, the displaced human workers are forced to choose between
upgrading skills in order to continue as (A) maintenance workers, or 
upgrading their skills in order to continue as (B) supervisors of the 
batteries of sophisticated machines that generate the world's material 
essentials. 

We are rapidly approaching a point where the needs of our machines are
beginning to exceed the needs of the humans who serve them.  Think 
about that for a while.  What does it imply?  Is that the intentional 
future you visualize? 

This dilemma needs to be resolved before a child can be educated.   It
is the prime reason for inventing your ancestors.  Mommy and Daddy 
never had to face a challenge of this kind. 

Seattle WA - October 22, 2000 - Gerald X. Diamond - 

All rights reserved 


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