Mark, I do not know if the below words will be published out to the public. If they are, that’s ok, but my objective is to propose some short videos dealing with our social challenges highlighted in your videos.

I admire your thinking in posting your videos; I have watched many of them. I offer doing a series of short videos that you can reject and not post on your website. My challenge is I have no understanding of the technology involved. I’m an old guy; my parents’ first telephone was a wooden box that hung on the wall that was powered by turning a crank.

My proposed videos would not provide answers to social problems but attempt to get people to think out of the polarized boxes that focus on symptoms instead of the causes of our challenges. I think many of the “solutions” found in each box to be right in some ways but wrong and harmful in others. Ideas expressed in both boxes indicate many Americans have no idea how our nation came into place and the improved concepts that have evolved. We have wonderful concepts but our actions are often counter to them.

Please allow an example. From the time I started the first grade in 1948 and until I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1964, there was not one police officer assigned to one of my schools. At OU there was a guy identified as responsible for security; his challenge was keeping students from parking in faculty lots. My parents were teachers while I was in school; not a dime was spent on security in the schools they taught in.

The year I graduated from OU was pivotal in our history. Massive efforts were made to improve our society. Many improvements have been made, but there is no emphasis on the fact that many of the negatives seen in your videos didn’t exist prior to 1964. Prior to that year we did not experience the extreme degrees of violence, escapes from reality through drugs, homelessness, broken families, low educational achievement, parents fleeing the public schools, and so on.

Today most efforts to improve society focus on the above symptoms, but there is little, if any, effort to identify the causes. Did our society change because of the repositioning of the stars and the moon? No. The negative results had to be caused by wrongful improvement efforts that need to be identified and corrected.

We have made massive advances in technology since our phone was powered with a crank, but our America still experiences the same social challenges that were problems then, except we now have new challenges that did not previously exist. Through the short videos I hope to get thinking out of the polarized boxes without enflaming positions and promote reasonable thinking and communication across the void that exists among us.

Can we discuss this possibility?

Joseph L. Bass, EdD (Southern Cal. - Focus on motivational psychology)
[email protected]