Tangent from 7th book/brainstorm
Nov. 26th, 2021 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mellotron_breakfastI have been trying to figure out what the idea or values behind my seventh book are as-is, before even doing anything super creative to transform the material I already have to work with. There are still no plans to ever release it, but it's nice to have something in my back pocket.
While I was doing that, I realized the initial idea isn't even what happens in the book, nor is it what this specific book could be about. So I still have a document for the book, but I've branched off a separate one where I consider shifting in personal values, shifting or budging the values of an entire social class if they've gone in a toxic direction, and my probably very middle class and non-confrontational views around that. As a spoiler alert, I go for the wealthiest class first but in fairness understand the first things that might need to change about the class that raised me, as it looks today. It's an unpolished brainstorm and I can't think it has most of the real answers that need filling in.
The importance of social value shift
As aforementioned: “It’s neat to think about whether and how social values can shift (for the better, for the worse, unintentionally, and intentionally, if we were to make a four-quadrant simple axis for that)”
This thing which will not be in the seventh book is important for another reason entirely. If we were to treat the values of a social class, let’s say the wealthiest class(es), as immutable, then any huge change required to save the world would require violence to happen. I don’t want violence. I find that people who too easily reach for violence can even be the kinds of people who will self-describe as politically to the left, but ultimately get frustrated with constant debating and want to reach for the simple solutions to complex problems again and again--until they become fascists. Actually, I think I just described the political career trajectory of Benito Mussolini and the establishing of fascism as we know it; a revolutionary movement that turns utterly toxic in the end. Force becomes necessary at ugly times but it can't become the easy go-to, the thing treated as "healthy" and "vital", the hammer that makes everything look like a nail.
Back to the point of values and whether they can shift. If middle-class values were equally immutable, [a critical mass of middle-class persons] would be too busy sucking up and trying to get into that wealthy class to turn to that violence [due to the prevalent attitude of "oh I'm just a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire and if I hustle and copy what I see from the people I admire, I am entitled to join them"], it's not certain whether the combined people who would use force are enough to cause a broader change, and instead we would just all be doomed to extinction and annihilation. And if lower class values were immutable, [a very large number but crucially not all] would be too busy doing their best to survive to generate any kind of sweeping change; that’s the position society puts them in, that’s why revolutions that work often have a huge middle-class component, so I’ve read.
But if we don’t want violence, the only way out that I see is if the social values of the upper/wealthy class, or any class for that matter, aren’t immutable/unchanging [and not only that, if such change could be directed instead of a natural decay we observe over time]. What if these values could be shifted or budged in a way that a sense of duty to everyone can be prioritized over a sense of entitlement? What if we had an outline for what a worthwhile expenditure was needed to save the world, as hard facts as we can manage, as fair to everyone as we can, and we shifted values toward cooperation? Intelligent cooperation, the synthesis of human group mentality and human ingenuity, is what has made us thrive as a species, likely responsible for the best and most interesting things we do; inversely, any time large groups of humans do anything wrong it’s often a corruption of this evolutionary value, or the harnessing of it toward evil instead of toward our surviving and thriving.
So, who knows how to reach people in order to shift or budge those values? Is it through art? Is it through the media they consume? I would love to think so because then it means I might have some role to play, however small. And then it means anyone who agrees with me who is better at producing that art/media can not only have a larger role than I do, they can succeed where I have yet to. Saving the world is more important than my glorification, so if you can do it, please don't wait for me to accomplish it on account of wanting me to personally benefit from being the hero, as I'm not sure that's what happens for me. For my part [given the societies in my books, which are not direct copies of what we live in today], I keep writing about the leader class and the view of service versus entitlement, and I have written about the nuances; that it takes more than just a service-minded orientation, it takes a lot of other knowledge, morals and ethics, to make sure it’s good healthy constructive service with excellent decision making. Kindness and carefulness. [Our powerful are not always there to be leaders, but we're reaching a time when responsibility has to be the price of admission for being in that top echelon anyway; once you’ve reached a critical mass of influence and power, you’ve basically put yourself into the shared stewardship of us all and we require responsibility to be exercised with that privilege, and you do have the power to fade away, transfer the shares, transfer the wealth, if you want someone else to have the responsibility that should come with that power instead. We’re not asking you to sacrifice your life if you want out.]
I see the entrenchment of entitlement as a value, of striving for hard social dominance as the end that justifies all means [whereas tapping into this portion of human urges may yet have a suitable role as a means, in support of or safeguarding biosphere, social justice and progress, things for which one might have to establish dominance over a problematic individual or cohort, not just trying to become king of the castle for the sake of the entitlement], and I would love to budge or shift that somehow so that a critical mass see what needs to be done about helping the biosphere and steering us all on a course toward a justice/true peace, where privileges still exist as both the means to enable the privileged to enact their leadership roles successfully, and also rewards for the absolute burden it places on individuals of that class. The fact that they wouldn’t have to give up absolutely everything because there are reasons they need to keep some privileges might be helpful in the persuasion process.
Gradual shift toward examining the middle class social decay
I look at the wealthy first because in terms of carbon footprint they are seen as both the most responsible in gross carbon and other emissions and also per capita; a small percentage of highly privileged people are seen as responsible for more than many many others combined. However, being fair is part of it. There seems to be no problem pointing down at the middle and lower classes and saying “stop using straws” or asking them to do their small part that adds up over time, because punching down at the middle class is a safer thing to do; it can hardly punch back, maybe it will write a nasty tweet or something. But asking to take accommodations away from disabled folks is not the way. The middle-class values that might need to shift or budge are those of, again, entitlement. It's not about forcing the removal of things that disabled folks need to survive; there's also this toxic conversation about asthma inhalers/respirators.
Feeling entitled to move up a class by working their hardest or following a set course; sadly, there is no set course, many things have to go right for a person and there's also a degree of wealth so absurd that we argue about whether anyone is entitled to it, or whether it had to be the result of extremely unusual circumstances and therefore shouldn't be a person's healthy aim. Feeling entitled to pretend to be upper class by abusing the credit system and overconsuming. Feeling like they’ll be happiest if they consume more things, own more things.
However, believing you have the right to live your life, believing that one eight-hour day of work at minimum wage should earn enough to live on as the most basic thing, that’s not entitlement; for many, even that doesn't go far enough, but it's a familiar starting point. We overwork people from whom we demand labour, we don’t hire more people, then we wonder why people are burnt out and why not enough of them have jobs. We fail to run things even in a way that labour agreed was doable and fought hard to achieve. If you wanted to shift toward a more utopian system that demands less labour and just more community building and community work from people, or something even more Roddenberrian than that, that’s a different discussion that will come up provided we save the world from immediate disaster first.
But a key point I will make here if I haven’t already is that societal forces foster a desire for “constantly more” probably because that drives up consumerism, it drives profit, and that drives pollution as well as a demand from wealthier interests to keep manufacturing more and more things—a reciprocal pressure on the upper class, perhaps. Can people learn what “enough” is? I don’t mean trendy minimalism which is often popular among people who weren’t hit so hard by scarcity or who know they always have a trust fund or family member to fall back on. I do wonder if artificially imposed scarcity has this side effect, or if we are breaking people on a broad scale in a way that we see exaggerated with hoarders: afraid to let go of things and often still accumulating more because of inflicted trauma. I live in a community where the appearance of wealth means so much to some people that they will abuse credit to the point of bankruptcy while putting their children into a private school, then constantly be unable to pay tuition because they can afford absolutely nothing of the life they occupy, and somewhere along the line the adults involved were convinced that they should do that or that they have to. I wish that sort of thing was a one-shot deal, but it's probably a broader pattern. Whereas I was the one who pushed for both independent living and chasing a self-publish dream so hard that he broke his credit cards and his rating with it, so I don't bring up examples like that in order to feel superior; I clock myself when looking at others. Credit and money, we like to talk about how we imagine them, but it's the mass consumption they're driving that's the biggest long-term danger, not so easily erased or bailed out.
Who is selling what values and why
And I don’t know what I would say to the lower classes because with the pressures on them of life or death, and constantly being played by classes above them, they still feel like the least to blame, even if they are sometimes led to bad behaviour by trauma, ignorance, desperation. We still love and understand them anyway and we can help them do better, and the number one way is to stop screwing with them and punching down so much. I'm not saying they have no change to make, I am saying I feel the least equipped to tell them what that is, and more equipped to say that people with privilege like me sell them contradictory or confusing values. “Be kind,” some of us say, which too often gets limited in the interpretation to “be nice to people" when the less advertised side of being kind is standing up to the unkind, and where it may even be unkind to not be firm with people in many cases; that full interpretation is intended for everyone in every class actually. But others say “watch your back, stay alive however you can, if you are kind you get taken advantage of", with the implication that those who are taught to be kind have been taught to be suckers and should be taken advantage of. Such thinking points squarely at white supremacists, Nazis, the type of people who think the world of humans can be divided into foxes and rabbits, and that if you have a choice between pointing a gun at someone and having a gun pointed at you, it's better to be an aggressor. If that thinking shows up anywhere else, maybe white supremacist infiltrators have instilled it in other communities as a method of sabotage. For one, all humans are the apex predator of this world, but this is because of that aforementioned ingenuity (and cooperation in numbers) which gives us the choice not to be wantonly cruel and not to be a bunch of Nazis. We get that choice. Someone who says we don't get that choice is making excuses for something.
The prevalence of this evil attitude favours the negative side. So the forces teaching or proliferating unkindness need to be addressed before we even get to the people learning the lessons, or do we arm people with the less advertised definition of being kind first before looking to the other side? But the lower classes are not children, either, and the way we engage with them, as with all adults, should not be a talking-down-to, but a talking-with. Dialogue. We save the harsh lectures for the people who have displayed malice, who know exactly what they are doing, or who don't seem to realize they are being the active villains, not just protecting themselves but making it worse for us all.
If people with the most power take responsibility, what are we asking them to be responsible for doing?
Wide scale social decay that needs repair. I wouldn't even know where to begin. People who are marginalized, BIPOC, front and centre; listen to the people being harmed, because they have come up with ideas about what justice is, reparations, how to get that moving. Empower them to do what they need to do. All these matters intersect anyway; food security, social justice, ecology, none of them are done right without being mindful of the others.
The biosphere solutions at all levels… geoengineering projects? Carbon capture? Indigenous land stewardship because they already protect so much natural ecosystem? Permaculture communities like what William Faith would advocate? Sustainable agriculture? Some of it is community level and some of it is lofty and expensive, and we probably need all of it, whatever it is, at all levels. Making sure any solution is intersectional and mindful of people as a part of a local ecosystem; just ask Friends of Borneo/Sumatra, formerly the Orangutan Project. If all you do is tell people to stop poaching and stop making palm plantations, but there's no roadmap to how else they can support themselves and their families, good luck. If they have something else they can clearly do and are being enabled to do and they continue poaching anyway, then you know it's greed instead of need.
In all cases everyone has a part to do, and how big that part is, is proportionate to how powerful and influential someone is; some people will get the feeling that they’re carrying the whole team because that’s the outcome of having taken on so much wealth and influence to one’s name, while those seen to be doing less, it will often be because their wealth and influence are so limited that they are doing what they can reasonably do. Someone else must surely know what is needed more than I do. I want to gather loose guidelines and ideas that people with better knowledge can build on.
For the solutions about anti-racism and LGBTQ rights, it’s best to consult the people who are being wronged. They have been talking and writing about this for a long time and they are the ones who taught me the word “intersectional”, so look to the ones who understand the importance of that instead of the ones who have fallen into a toxic mindset; remember, the issues are separate, a person can be gay and racist, and the gay racist person needs to be anti-racist. One doesn’t cancel the other out. Same the other way around, an anti-racist person could have homophobia for example or transphobia that needs addressing. Every solution about ending poverty and saving the biosphere will consider the other issues, saving the biosphere while addressing poverty because humans are a part of the biosphere to be saved also, ending poverty but in a way that saves the biosphere, and making sure we save disabled people, BIPOC, LGBTQ, issues I’m ignorant of but that need to be added, basically no person left behind because we need them and the role they play. So if we don’t want to create plastic straws because of the pollution, we need to consider what people who need straws will use, and they apparently can’t use metal or wood, and paper is limited for other reasons; we need to consider what we want them to do instead. Same with asthma inhalers. They say some biodegradeable plastics can be made from plant matter, and that could be a solution for disposable things that need to be plastic. Telling people to do their part looks to ask for a reduction in wants, not needs. I know that gets tricky when people are so used to getting their wants that these wants resemble needs, but with disabilities, we’re dealing with needs. We may have hit the limits on what we can expect some people to do as their share, and we may have to stop letting this steal focus from what the ultra wealthy are doing. It seems like a distraction sometimes.
Maybe all this is already in the works and they're doing all they can. I hope so, because starting now might be too late. I am not connected to things, I have no idea who is up to what.
While I was doing that, I realized the initial idea isn't even what happens in the book, nor is it what this specific book could be about. So I still have a document for the book, but I've branched off a separate one where I consider shifting in personal values, shifting or budging the values of an entire social class if they've gone in a toxic direction, and my probably very middle class and non-confrontational views around that. As a spoiler alert, I go for the wealthiest class first but in fairness understand the first things that might need to change about the class that raised me, as it looks today. It's an unpolished brainstorm and I can't think it has most of the real answers that need filling in.
The importance of social value shift
As aforementioned: “It’s neat to think about whether and how social values can shift (for the better, for the worse, unintentionally, and intentionally, if we were to make a four-quadrant simple axis for that)”
This thing which will not be in the seventh book is important for another reason entirely. If we were to treat the values of a social class, let’s say the wealthiest class(es), as immutable, then any huge change required to save the world would require violence to happen. I don’t want violence. I find that people who too easily reach for violence can even be the kinds of people who will self-describe as politically to the left, but ultimately get frustrated with constant debating and want to reach for the simple solutions to complex problems again and again--until they become fascists. Actually, I think I just described the political career trajectory of Benito Mussolini and the establishing of fascism as we know it; a revolutionary movement that turns utterly toxic in the end. Force becomes necessary at ugly times but it can't become the easy go-to, the thing treated as "healthy" and "vital", the hammer that makes everything look like a nail.
Back to the point of values and whether they can shift. If middle-class values were equally immutable, [a critical mass of middle-class persons] would be too busy sucking up and trying to get into that wealthy class to turn to that violence [due to the prevalent attitude of "oh I'm just a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire and if I hustle and copy what I see from the people I admire, I am entitled to join them"], it's not certain whether the combined people who would use force are enough to cause a broader change, and instead we would just all be doomed to extinction and annihilation. And if lower class values were immutable, [a very large number but crucially not all] would be too busy doing their best to survive to generate any kind of sweeping change; that’s the position society puts them in, that’s why revolutions that work often have a huge middle-class component, so I’ve read.
But if we don’t want violence, the only way out that I see is if the social values of the upper/wealthy class, or any class for that matter, aren’t immutable/unchanging [and not only that, if such change could be directed instead of a natural decay we observe over time]. What if these values could be shifted or budged in a way that a sense of duty to everyone can be prioritized over a sense of entitlement? What if we had an outline for what a worthwhile expenditure was needed to save the world, as hard facts as we can manage, as fair to everyone as we can, and we shifted values toward cooperation? Intelligent cooperation, the synthesis of human group mentality and human ingenuity, is what has made us thrive as a species, likely responsible for the best and most interesting things we do; inversely, any time large groups of humans do anything wrong it’s often a corruption of this evolutionary value, or the harnessing of it toward evil instead of toward our surviving and thriving.
So, who knows how to reach people in order to shift or budge those values? Is it through art? Is it through the media they consume? I would love to think so because then it means I might have some role to play, however small. And then it means anyone who agrees with me who is better at producing that art/media can not only have a larger role than I do, they can succeed where I have yet to. Saving the world is more important than my glorification, so if you can do it, please don't wait for me to accomplish it on account of wanting me to personally benefit from being the hero, as I'm not sure that's what happens for me. For my part [given the societies in my books, which are not direct copies of what we live in today], I keep writing about the leader class and the view of service versus entitlement, and I have written about the nuances; that it takes more than just a service-minded orientation, it takes a lot of other knowledge, morals and ethics, to make sure it’s good healthy constructive service with excellent decision making. Kindness and carefulness. [Our powerful are not always there to be leaders, but we're reaching a time when responsibility has to be the price of admission for being in that top echelon anyway; once you’ve reached a critical mass of influence and power, you’ve basically put yourself into the shared stewardship of us all and we require responsibility to be exercised with that privilege, and you do have the power to fade away, transfer the shares, transfer the wealth, if you want someone else to have the responsibility that should come with that power instead. We’re not asking you to sacrifice your life if you want out.]
I see the entrenchment of entitlement as a value, of striving for hard social dominance as the end that justifies all means [whereas tapping into this portion of human urges may yet have a suitable role as a means, in support of or safeguarding biosphere, social justice and progress, things for which one might have to establish dominance over a problematic individual or cohort, not just trying to become king of the castle for the sake of the entitlement], and I would love to budge or shift that somehow so that a critical mass see what needs to be done about helping the biosphere and steering us all on a course toward a justice/true peace, where privileges still exist as both the means to enable the privileged to enact their leadership roles successfully, and also rewards for the absolute burden it places on individuals of that class. The fact that they wouldn’t have to give up absolutely everything because there are reasons they need to keep some privileges might be helpful in the persuasion process.
Gradual shift toward examining the middle class social decay
I look at the wealthy first because in terms of carbon footprint they are seen as both the most responsible in gross carbon and other emissions and also per capita; a small percentage of highly privileged people are seen as responsible for more than many many others combined. However, being fair is part of it. There seems to be no problem pointing down at the middle and lower classes and saying “stop using straws” or asking them to do their small part that adds up over time, because punching down at the middle class is a safer thing to do; it can hardly punch back, maybe it will write a nasty tweet or something. But asking to take accommodations away from disabled folks is not the way. The middle-class values that might need to shift or budge are those of, again, entitlement. It's not about forcing the removal of things that disabled folks need to survive; there's also this toxic conversation about asthma inhalers/respirators.
Feeling entitled to move up a class by working their hardest or following a set course; sadly, there is no set course, many things have to go right for a person and there's also a degree of wealth so absurd that we argue about whether anyone is entitled to it, or whether it had to be the result of extremely unusual circumstances and therefore shouldn't be a person's healthy aim. Feeling entitled to pretend to be upper class by abusing the credit system and overconsuming. Feeling like they’ll be happiest if they consume more things, own more things.
However, believing you have the right to live your life, believing that one eight-hour day of work at minimum wage should earn enough to live on as the most basic thing, that’s not entitlement; for many, even that doesn't go far enough, but it's a familiar starting point. We overwork people from whom we demand labour, we don’t hire more people, then we wonder why people are burnt out and why not enough of them have jobs. We fail to run things even in a way that labour agreed was doable and fought hard to achieve. If you wanted to shift toward a more utopian system that demands less labour and just more community building and community work from people, or something even more Roddenberrian than that, that’s a different discussion that will come up provided we save the world from immediate disaster first.
But a key point I will make here if I haven’t already is that societal forces foster a desire for “constantly more” probably because that drives up consumerism, it drives profit, and that drives pollution as well as a demand from wealthier interests to keep manufacturing more and more things—a reciprocal pressure on the upper class, perhaps. Can people learn what “enough” is? I don’t mean trendy minimalism which is often popular among people who weren’t hit so hard by scarcity or who know they always have a trust fund or family member to fall back on. I do wonder if artificially imposed scarcity has this side effect, or if we are breaking people on a broad scale in a way that we see exaggerated with hoarders: afraid to let go of things and often still accumulating more because of inflicted trauma. I live in a community where the appearance of wealth means so much to some people that they will abuse credit to the point of bankruptcy while putting their children into a private school, then constantly be unable to pay tuition because they can afford absolutely nothing of the life they occupy, and somewhere along the line the adults involved were convinced that they should do that or that they have to. I wish that sort of thing was a one-shot deal, but it's probably a broader pattern. Whereas I was the one who pushed for both independent living and chasing a self-publish dream so hard that he broke his credit cards and his rating with it, so I don't bring up examples like that in order to feel superior; I clock myself when looking at others. Credit and money, we like to talk about how we imagine them, but it's the mass consumption they're driving that's the biggest long-term danger, not so easily erased or bailed out.
Who is selling what values and why
And I don’t know what I would say to the lower classes because with the pressures on them of life or death, and constantly being played by classes above them, they still feel like the least to blame, even if they are sometimes led to bad behaviour by trauma, ignorance, desperation. We still love and understand them anyway and we can help them do better, and the number one way is to stop screwing with them and punching down so much. I'm not saying they have no change to make, I am saying I feel the least equipped to tell them what that is, and more equipped to say that people with privilege like me sell them contradictory or confusing values. “Be kind,” some of us say, which too often gets limited in the interpretation to “be nice to people" when the less advertised side of being kind is standing up to the unkind, and where it may even be unkind to not be firm with people in many cases; that full interpretation is intended for everyone in every class actually. But others say “watch your back, stay alive however you can, if you are kind you get taken advantage of", with the implication that those who are taught to be kind have been taught to be suckers and should be taken advantage of. Such thinking points squarely at white supremacists, Nazis, the type of people who think the world of humans can be divided into foxes and rabbits, and that if you have a choice between pointing a gun at someone and having a gun pointed at you, it's better to be an aggressor. If that thinking shows up anywhere else, maybe white supremacist infiltrators have instilled it in other communities as a method of sabotage. For one, all humans are the apex predator of this world, but this is because of that aforementioned ingenuity (and cooperation in numbers) which gives us the choice not to be wantonly cruel and not to be a bunch of Nazis. We get that choice. Someone who says we don't get that choice is making excuses for something.
The prevalence of this evil attitude favours the negative side. So the forces teaching or proliferating unkindness need to be addressed before we even get to the people learning the lessons, or do we arm people with the less advertised definition of being kind first before looking to the other side? But the lower classes are not children, either, and the way we engage with them, as with all adults, should not be a talking-down-to, but a talking-with. Dialogue. We save the harsh lectures for the people who have displayed malice, who know exactly what they are doing, or who don't seem to realize they are being the active villains, not just protecting themselves but making it worse for us all.
If people with the most power take responsibility, what are we asking them to be responsible for doing?
Wide scale social decay that needs repair. I wouldn't even know where to begin. People who are marginalized, BIPOC, front and centre; listen to the people being harmed, because they have come up with ideas about what justice is, reparations, how to get that moving. Empower them to do what they need to do. All these matters intersect anyway; food security, social justice, ecology, none of them are done right without being mindful of the others.
The biosphere solutions at all levels… geoengineering projects? Carbon capture? Indigenous land stewardship because they already protect so much natural ecosystem? Permaculture communities like what William Faith would advocate? Sustainable agriculture? Some of it is community level and some of it is lofty and expensive, and we probably need all of it, whatever it is, at all levels. Making sure any solution is intersectional and mindful of people as a part of a local ecosystem; just ask Friends of Borneo/Sumatra, formerly the Orangutan Project. If all you do is tell people to stop poaching and stop making palm plantations, but there's no roadmap to how else they can support themselves and their families, good luck. If they have something else they can clearly do and are being enabled to do and they continue poaching anyway, then you know it's greed instead of need.
In all cases everyone has a part to do, and how big that part is, is proportionate to how powerful and influential someone is; some people will get the feeling that they’re carrying the whole team because that’s the outcome of having taken on so much wealth and influence to one’s name, while those seen to be doing less, it will often be because their wealth and influence are so limited that they are doing what they can reasonably do. Someone else must surely know what is needed more than I do. I want to gather loose guidelines and ideas that people with better knowledge can build on.
For the solutions about anti-racism and LGBTQ rights, it’s best to consult the people who are being wronged. They have been talking and writing about this for a long time and they are the ones who taught me the word “intersectional”, so look to the ones who understand the importance of that instead of the ones who have fallen into a toxic mindset; remember, the issues are separate, a person can be gay and racist, and the gay racist person needs to be anti-racist. One doesn’t cancel the other out. Same the other way around, an anti-racist person could have homophobia for example or transphobia that needs addressing. Every solution about ending poverty and saving the biosphere will consider the other issues, saving the biosphere while addressing poverty because humans are a part of the biosphere to be saved also, ending poverty but in a way that saves the biosphere, and making sure we save disabled people, BIPOC, LGBTQ, issues I’m ignorant of but that need to be added, basically no person left behind because we need them and the role they play. So if we don’t want to create plastic straws because of the pollution, we need to consider what people who need straws will use, and they apparently can’t use metal or wood, and paper is limited for other reasons; we need to consider what we want them to do instead. Same with asthma inhalers. They say some biodegradeable plastics can be made from plant matter, and that could be a solution for disposable things that need to be plastic. Telling people to do their part looks to ask for a reduction in wants, not needs. I know that gets tricky when people are so used to getting their wants that these wants resemble needs, but with disabilities, we’re dealing with needs. We may have hit the limits on what we can expect some people to do as their share, and we may have to stop letting this steal focus from what the ultra wealthy are doing. It seems like a distraction sometimes.
Maybe all this is already in the works and they're doing all they can. I hope so, because starting now might be too late. I am not connected to things, I have no idea who is up to what.
