Knowing Which Bookmarks To Keep

When writing a series of books that parallels the activities of us on our planet in our universe, tweaking just a little so that it resembles the real parallel universe interlaced with ours without giving away too much, I forget to write chapters that I'd invented or were given to me by others to put down.  Such is the misfortune of living a spectral way of thinking, where everything is integrated together and one's thoughts look like one's activities and vice versa.

Thus, I cannot remember which is true.  Did I just read that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will give a total of $10 billion to solve a subset of world problems or did I imagine they would follow in the philanthropic footsteps of others like the Rockefellers to write a chapter of history for themselves in a positive light?  Either way, $10 billion seems like a big number to me, even after suffering the numbing effect of all the trillions of dollars that have been spent to prop up financial institutions to save the world economy from collapsing.  Thanks, Bill and Melinda!

I still remember to ask these questions:

• How do Japanese and Korean auto workers live after retirement?  On what do they depend to support food, housing, medical and other expenditures?
• How do Americans, like the older labourer named Danny I met in Wal-Mart, live after they stop actively working in the marketplace?  If there is no viable social safety net, how do we find sustainable employment or other means of economic support for workers like Danny as they get older?  Do we start sharing our underused homes with people who have no homes?  What did we learn from the experiences of homeowners who opened up their houses to people displaced by Hurricane Katrina?
• So far, Obama has shown he is an eloquent speaker who likes to drum up positive support from his grassroots organization that helped get him elected.  His wife and kids are playing the near-perfect support role of First Lady and First Daughters.  With Obama's three years as U.S. President left in this term of office, what can Americans do to get their thoughts about industry and government moving in a more positive direction so that we put aside our differences and solve world problems even if we don't have $10 billion in our bank accounts?
• Isn't it time we all reread the Universal Declaration of People's [Human] Rights?
• One day, we will see the most dynamic leader from the universally-recognized most persecuted group on Earth (with the least emotional baggage of/with other groups) as our world leader.  Some have seen Obama holding that role but he seems like a placeholder for someone more experienced politically and better connected (i.e., more real power) to come later.  In my studies, including reviews of the indigenous peoples of this continent and examples of their influence such as the YMCA Indian Guides wooden box (made by my father) that contains a headdress, moccasins and paperwork from the late 1960s, I wonder if there is someone from a native tribe on this continent who will emerge in that role.  Some would want the 14th Dalai Lama to fill that position but he has too much negative emotional baggage with the leaders of China.  In years past, the United States promoted people of Scots-Irish descent into world leadership positions because they represented an oppressed/repressed and persecuted people who only mildly offended the British.  Marx, Lenin and Mao have represented the oppressed proletariat in times past until they came to represent a new form of oppression.  The name Gandhi stills maintains a positive image for much of the world (he also demonstrates the crossover of a popular person's world status and a near-religious godlike figure, reminding me to say that I am not including historic religious figures such as Mohammed, Buddha, or Jesus in this discussion).  Who will rise from the lower socioeconomic class and be welcomed by the middle and upper classes as their spokesperson to lead us into the middle and later periods of this century?  Who will have lived a simple but well-connected life and continue to shun the trappings of materialism while rising to power?  Who will have recall of all the major philosophies of our people and be able to converse easily in other languages with no pretense of mental superiourity while talking with the least educated among us?  Who will gather a group of leaders that desires to maintain a healthy balance between commercial enterprises and noncommercial interests, between local/national fervor and equal rights for all, between warmongers and peacemakers, between the haves and the have-nots, between the educated and the ignorant and between what we know is right and what we only guess is somewhat right for the moment?  All this without becoming a cult figure who insists on leading us for a lifetime; instead, this person willingly "retires" to private life after passing the torch to those who may be as effective but not as dynamic.  A leader/mentor/coach, not a bureaucrat.  A person who has not had to make public political compromises along the way.  A person who embraces all people, without making fun of those who disagree (because we know there is no such thing as 100% agreement with what we all individually believe).  Does/can such a person exist who offends very few people?
• How do I reconcile my belief in social progress with my dislike of socialism as a political, bureaucratic institution because of the knowledge that socialism - really, any form of government with established bureaucracies (including large portions of Western democratic governments) - leads to more and more inefficiencies and ineffective economies of scale?  Free market, laissez-faire "decisionmaking" versus centralised market planning is not the argument here, I don't believe, because we still walk blindly into the future no matter how well we think we planned for contingencies in the next moment.  Do we just keep moving forward with our regional governments that run their own social experiments within the realm of changing tastes in the marketplace and cooperate with one another to prevent major wars and economic fallouts, letting social trends swing back and forth on small pendulums (countries, NGOs, cooperatives/communes, corporations, etc.) hanging off the end of one big imaginary/invisible pendulum so that we never really ever swing too far in any one direction globally?  How much inefficiency is inherent in a large people-based system (or set of systems), making "social progress" (continually maximising our society's shape toward reaching the most, best-possible, 100% completely-satisfying socioeconomic freedom per person) a moot point?