Children instinctively understand the concept of fairness: its inherent rightness, and selfishness' inherent wrongness. They somehow know--at least among psychologically well adjusted kids--that it is as wrong to ask them to give up their turn on the merry-go-round for the person who has already ridden it, just as it is for them to "hog" all of the turns on the ride.
We are not going to solve our nation's problems with direction from our "leaders;" the direction must come from those whom all true sovereign power is derived: The People. The "system" has become so corrupted by money and the promise of power, that only by adopting a paradigm of partnership, similar to that proposed by Riane Eisler, at all levels of our society, do we have even the slightest chance of a better future for our children and their children.
There is another term for a "partnership society," which is "democracy." It is only when you read books like Ms. Eisler's The Chalice and The Blade, and Thom Hartmann's What Would Jefferson Do? that you begin to realize that democracy is the natural order for most of human society that has advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage in its development. Monarchs, oligarchs, and any other hierarchical system is imposed when the rules of the partnership are broken by ecological disaster, or a small segment of society who have natural sociopathic tendencies, or when a nation is conquered by a foreign foe. Then that one segment of society or foreign foe takes control of and dominates the rest of a society.
This ultimately leads to a movement by the dominators to establish a class system, where the elite overvalue themselves, and undervalue the other members of society, usually based upon those other members' ability to assert themselves against those in power. As it historically is only the dominator class who has the time and resources to write about a nation's events and trials, the lower classes are invariably denigrated by historians as lazy, selfish morons who desire only "bread and circuses."
This "history" is invariably used as an excuse to oppress the lower classes, and demote hard working craftsmen, farmers, herdsmen, etc., into a class of mere workers; interchangeable parts of a greater economic machine. From there, it is a short step to "slave," whether that is a wage slave, sharecropper, serf, or the more formal enslavement known in Rome and Greece, where profit is the only consideration and all consideration of humanity is lost.
"I worked like a slave for years,
Sweat so hard just to end my fears;
Not to end my life a poor man,
But by now I know I should have run."
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