Issues and values

Issues and values of ones life are always personal. These are reasons for choosing to teach. The central principles that map out the classes I teach and articles I write are the reasons I entered the profession in the first place.

These core values begin with the hope of understanding the world around me. Max Weber introduced a concept called Sympathetic Understanding, which means not making guesses or making statements of others based on preexisting attitudes toward a people. Because all people have imagination they are able to develop empathy toward people whose lives are different from their own. Through rational understanding based on data, this Compassionate Insight is brought about by information about real people in their own cultural and historical setting, based on Facts not Fiction.  This is the origin of empathy. From this ethics is born.

This is followed by citizenship and social responsibility. In life options and in career choices begin with a commitment to community service and making a contribution to the greater world around the individual and this is always the real bottom line. Everyone wants and deserves to earn a comfortable income, but the money is always secondary. The bottom line then is service.  Working to make a better world and doing something for a larger purpose. Value is what we give to others in our jobs, real career choice is public service and money comes in number two. From public service ethics is grows and matures.

Next there is intellectual curiosity, which is born from the sheer love of learning. The humbling insight that no matter how much one learns there is always so much more to know. The professor is but a student of her discipline.

Last there is craftsmanship.  This exceptionally skilled craft of the artisan is the love of the art of the trade. This purposeful creation of beauty as a talent is true for laborers, scholars, teachers, janitors, scientists, historians or philosophers. We are all artisans.

Small family businesses are the moral center of our communities. The Service/ Public sector is the ethical bedrock of our nation as a whole. Both are principled and solid underpinnings of traditional participatory democracy. I want to talk about the public sector.

The true backbone of America is the public employees in education and the social service. The Federal, State, County, and City employees are the moral fabric of America.  They are the educators, they are our protectors, they manage our public lands; keep up our parks, road and highways. Yet "a bad moon is rising on the right". With an economy in the toilet because of speculative investments, financial institutions borrowing from other financial institutions and unable or unwilling to repay and in need of government intervention once again to save the rest of us. It seems at least once a decade we need government intervention to save the capitalists from themselves. Now it is the public employees are being blamed for an economic crisis not of their making. With two wars that never made any sense and bankrupting America, credit crisis at every level because of depraved dicey economic venture speculation based upon the ancient principals of organized crime i.e. corporate investments and the dogma of a free market, which has never existed. How is it the public employees are to blame?

Now it is being said public employees are over paid.  They are not. Their very modest wages and benefits are the result of democratic collective bargaining. With the criminals in investment capital gaining a reprieve from Washington and the illicit organization popularly known as "Wall Street" once again up to old tricks we need to radically reevaluate how we approach economics. We need to throw out the rules proven to be a failure and come up with a daring vision for America.