Sunday Musings – July 17, 2022
One community
Professional organizations and legislators at all levels of the body politic have fallen into trap of believing that humans are robots who need to be explicitly told what to do and not to do at every step of their professional and community journey. The result is that individuals in all part of their life often operate from a position of fear and respond by either ignoring all the rules or acting out. An essential part of his system are professional boards, attorneys, and overzealous law enforcement individuals who are determined to rid the professions and/or community of these rule/law breaking individuals. To be fair, there are a few places in the world where the goal is restorative justice. There are also those boards whose only concern is helping the individual do whatever they need to do to do whatever they need to do to return to being the professional they want and need to be. Too often, however, the relationship between the staff of the organization and the offending professional is an adversarial one.
The point is that most of us are not at our best because there are a thousand rules telling us what to do and not to do. Most of us are at our best when we take care of our emotional, spiritual. physical and nutritional health. Most of us are at our best when we know it is safe ask for help.
The bottom line is that all ethical guidelines/laws/rules can be summarize as:
Practice the golden rule - treat others as you want to be treated.
Practice holistic health care.
Make it safe to ask for help.
Make it safe to be honest with self and others.
Fear is not a good motivator for ethical/moral behavior. Open carry guns are a symptom of the fear with which many people live. I do not personally believe that violence or the constant threat of violence is a helpful or necessary for us humans to respect and take care of each other. I am personally sorry that many seem to interpret the second amendment of the United States Constitution as the right to treat our neighbors as potential enemies. We may indeed have some unhealthy neighbors, but the solution is to make it safe and easy to ask for help or to help individuals and families get help. We may indeed have some neighbors who justifiably believe as if their needs and concerns are not important. We need to do all we can to ensure that all feel as if everything is being done to allow everyone to take good care of themselves and their families. It is not, for example, helpful to advocate closing down coal mines without addressing the need for coal miners to continue to be paid a wage which allows him or her to take good care of themselves and their family. Telling a coal miner that one is going to shut down the coal mine and offering them a minimum wage job is not kind, moral or helpful. It is not going to result in the outed coal miner feeling as if he or she is a neighbor and friend. It may result in feeling as if one is living in enemy territory Once one believes the person next door is an enemy then it is easy for some to believe that this is the enemy to who, the second amendment protects one from and against whom one must protect oneself with aa lethal weapon.
I am in favor of a community without guns or other lethal weapons; a community in which everyone is vaccinated; a community in which everyone wears a mask in public when there is a resurge of variants of Covid or other communicable diseases; a community where it is safe to keep one’s door unlocked because no one has an unequal share of needed resources; a community in which quality health care is available to all; a community where people feel and act as if we are one community; one family. We are not going to achieve such a community by enacting many laws which do not address the core issues of inequality. We are not going to creates such a community by making enemies out of each other and enacting new laws to punish our enemies. I believe such a community is possible. We will still have mental illness, but we will treat those with mental illness as sick and not as criminals who need to be punished.
Just this morning I read of a parent being accused of child abuse because their 4-year wandered off while she was tending to the two-year-old. She needs a helping hand and not to be treated as a child abuser.
We need each other’s help and not to be judged and punished. We need community does not wall and guns and hate.
Written July 17, 2022
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
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