I still have a vision, for which many have called me a hopeless dreamer, of one possible way our society could look, maybe in 70 years, or maybe even sooner, 
if we all wanted it to happen. It involves four main phases, broken down into smaller goals, with the ultimate hope being to build a world as safe and free for creative human endeavor as possible. For every human being on this planet. This post is mostly about a small part of Phase I, but other posts have begun, and will continue, to explain the remaining phases and the overall idea. (
We begin our Statues of Limitations Saturdays with this early post outlining the idea of ‘Financial Self-Defense’ here, which became part of #ProjectDoBetter’s Phase I section: Public Financial Knowledge Infrastructure 
S. Destinie
)
The first phase involves building empathy, and bringing each one of us to see each one of our fellow human beings as … a human being. Each one meriting humane treatment, and human dignity.
That empathy building phase was Phase 0 (yes, I’m a computer scientist by first training, so I start with 0…). Phase I is meant to go from the years 2015 to 2030, building a movement to strengthen some of our most crucial and obviously key pieces of our social infrastructure, which are in the public domain. During this period, one of the ways that we can both build conceptual support and also literally build our physical infrastructure that needs support, is by borrowing an idea from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which worked during the Great Depression to create jobs while educating young (white) men at the same time. What we want to do now, is to educate, facilitate service, and build a community-service frame of reference, while also upgrading our public infrastructure, just as FDR did in the 1930’s via his program.
Bringing back an updated version of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or Roosevelt’s Tree Army, as it was popularly known, could provide a stepping stone between the empathy-building work that must always be on-going, and the support-building work of bringing our society to a consensus on the needed support for the most basic of our public social infrastructure institutions, like Public Libraries, Public Transportation, Public Education (especially in the financial and legal areas, where so many consumers fall prey to financial predators, and end up in debt due to lack of knowledge), and Public Health. These four systems under gird our entire societal structure, and need support perhaps the most urgently, in return for which we potentially get the most payback for all members of society. While we do the difficult work of building the necessary consensus to get there from here, a simpler step might be to bring back some form of the CCC, updated to be far more inclusive, and used as both a means of providing employment to young people, and also to educate them, much like the Gap Year in Europe. But instead of having our new high school graduates backpack around the country, they could be sent to work in urban public library branches, light-rail and subway/Metro stations, local urban public schools, or inner city health clinics. As they rotate from one part of the country to another, say, monthly, they learn first-hand of the conditions in places they are not from and have not lived, while serving communities they have never met, working alongside peers from different walks of life, and seeing a side of their native land that they did not grow up with. In short, learning the realities, and different perspectives, of this large and diverse nation of ours.
The rest of the ideas are here, with a warning that they will be rearranged and better explained in future posts: (My hope, in 2014, was that the precautions/programs described below, particularly the TinyHouse/Bedsit on an acre/person, would prevent child abuse, by giving all human beings at any age once capable of reaching the stove and cooking an egg, permission and power to get the hell out of Dodge if necessary…)
The Adulthood Challenge is Phase II of a four phase program of Equality and Health for All, which I’ve been modifying since 2014.
Action Items:
1.) Share your findings after you look up the CCC, preferably finding two different sources;
2.) Find your Senator’s local office address;
3.) Write a letter to your Senator, email it, and then snail-mail it to the local office;
Gratefully,
Let’s #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness, & #EndMoneyBail and support these four key parts of our #PublicDomainInfrastructure & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #libraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write, Ranked Choice Voting and Housing for ALL!!!!, Walk !
ShiraDest
September, 12020 HE
… More:
The Goals (allowing each person to contribute fully)for Pre-Adulthood, Adults, and a new Rite of Passage to bridge the two:
2. Each person, as a Pre-Adult, must learn to swim, or to find water, if in the desert,
3. Each Pre-Adult must learn self-defense (emotional, physical, and financial self-defense),
4. Map and compass-based navigation, and thus reading, writing, and mathematics up to trigonometry, should be taught, in spite of GPS, so that each person is at least familiar with them.
1. Every infant, world-wide, at birth receives half a hectare of land, non-alienable. He or she may rent, lend or swap the land, but always remains the owner. Where ever the location, it should have a well or a spring on the parcel of land, and be arable (to grow luxury fruits to supplement the free basic beans, rice & greens rations).
4. Fresh water for ever person (free!)
5. Each family should have a book in the local public library, containing the autobiography of every person in the family (which means that each person needs free time and the means to write his or her autobiography).
—-
A New Rite of Passage
We need a new rite of passage in which every teenager must voluntarily teach someone, from start to finish, a usable and important skill. It must be a skill which the person has to use in the real world, such as moving from the alphabet to reading chapter books, or from counting numbers up to multiplication tables, or from writing a sentence to writing an essay, or from no English to conversational or passable workplace English in the United States.
This needs to be a project which requires a serious investment of time (preferably meeting for two or three hours each weekday) for about one year. That way the young person can look back with pride on a serious accomplishment and justifiably claim his or her status as an adult. Along the way, several problems in our modern society can be solved at the same time :
-The increasing lack of self-discipline, civility and respect for learning among the young.
-The shortage of teachers combined with the budgetary shortfalls in most states would be somewhat mitigated by adding the numbers of teenage students needing to finish their “Adulthood Project” to the number of classroom aides and volunteers.
-The need for challenges and self-testing during the adolescent stage of life which is left unfulfilled by modern society´s unsatisfyingly arbirary definition of adulthood.
I would propose that implementing such an idea should begin with involving the local community by having the adolescent (or if still in his/her 20´s, the “pre-adult”) bring a person to meet with the community to show the starting point of the teaching process. After the learning objective has been attained, the pre-adult and the learner would return to meet again with the community to assess the effectiveness of teaching and to award the pre-adult his or her status as an Adult, with the full rights and responsibilities expected of an adult, including such cultural norms as civility, courtesy, and even graciousness.
In this way we may move from a society where rudeness is the norm to one in which graciousness is valued. For example, a friend tells of an incident where a lady´s dog snarled at her, and the lady apologized, which was the civil thing to do, and then even offered to call a cab for her, which was the gracious thing to do. A society in which graciousness is valued will be both a more compassionate society and a more creative one. I leave these thoughts for contemplation, debate, and action.
Perhaps these precautions would prevent child sexual abuse?
Partial translation, to be re-written, my apologies, time is lacking:
Un programa de Igualdad y Salud para Todos
Las Metas (para que todos pueden contribuir lo mejor):
1. Cada quien, de niño, debe aprender nadar
2. Que cada quien de niño aprende defenderse
3. Que cada bebe, al nacer, recibe .5 hectarios de terreno, que
nunca se puede desprender. Se lo puede alquilar o prestar,
pero siempre sigue esta persona como dueño o dueña del
terreno. Que sea donde sea, será con un poso de agua y
capaz de agricolar.
4. Agua potable para cada persona
5. Que cada familia tenga un libro en la biblioteca publica,
con resumen del autobiografía de cada persona de la familia
(eso quiere decir que cada quien tenga el tiempo libre y los
recursos para escribir su autobiografia)
Read, Write, Run, Teach !
Un programa de Igualdad y Salud para Todos
Perhaps these precautions would prevent child sexual abuse?
New book on Community Cooperation to Share
Mar. 24th, 2014 03:57 pm
“At the turn of the century, both communities developed similar ways of evading White discrimination. Both communities built their own institutions, … ” which “… deepens the connection between them. Cooperation in other areas built ties that would eventually lead to the well-known actions of the later Civil Rights era in the 1960´s.”
–Excerpt : (p. 17, 18) of “Stayed on Freedom’s Call: Cooperation Between Jewish And African-American Communities In Washington, DC” is a contribution to the shared history of Black and Jewish Washington, DC that should be shared among all communities, in every city. This story of cooperation is the story of humanity, which shows that Dr. King’s Dream, Gandhi’s ideals, and our potential, indeed can overcome.
La Coopération pour la guerre à la guerre avec Le Corps Civil de Protection de l’Environnement
Mar. 17th, 2014 03:59 pm
meowdate: (Default)
Pourquoi nous avons besoin, aux États-Unis, de reconstituer le Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC, Corps Civil de Protection de l’Environnement) ?
Parce que nous avons besoin de défis. Bien-sûr, notre société a beaucoup de défis. La guerre semble être le plus grand pourvoyeur de défis. Mais la guerre est évitable si nous choisissons trouver les moyens de coopérer les uns avec les autres.
William James a dit, dans son essai de 1910 L’équivalent Moral de la Guerre que : « La guerre à la guerre ne sera pas une partie de plaisir. »
Il avait raison bien-sûr. Albert Einstein était d’accord. Son « Plan de deux pour-cents » admet que ce n’est pas facile à convaincre ne serait-ce que deux pour-cents de militaires à jeter les armes. Mais un ersatz pour ce besoin de défis pour notre société pourrait venir d’ailleurs, comme nous l’avons vu au cours de la Grande Dépression : que des gens ordinaires travaillant ensemble aient une discipline militaire.
« Nous devons créer de nouvelles énergies pour canaliser la virilité à laquelle l’esprit militaire s’accroche si fidèlement. Les vertus martiales doivent être le ciment durable, l’intrépidité, la faculté de vivre de manière spartiate, l’abandon de l’intérêt privé, l’obéissance à … »
Une nouvelle conscription pour le CCC permettrait de d’offrir un tel débouché. Le défi, la discipline, la coopération et l’infrastructure pour résoudre les problèmes profonds et de division qui conduisent à la guerre.
starting 
Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better 