About a year ago, I began a personal campaign to try to FOCUS on the real problems facing our society and our world. Since I’m hoping this blog will bring in a new audience, I’d like to take a minute to revisit the reasons why.

Focus. It’s what “they” don’t want us to do. But I’m trying to be better at it. We have an enormous number of problems in this country and world, but at a basic level I think the problems are all driven by our underlying economic and political system — corporatist plutocracy. I originally wrote about this in 2005 (will repost here soon), but I still agree with the intent. I’ve just thought more about it since then.

If you accept that we are a nation in which “rule for the rich” is the norm, then much of what we’re seeing now fits into that description. And if you don’t like the way the system works and want to change it, then some fundamental changes to our current system are called for.

Police brutality? Societal racism? Poverty? Inequality? Lack of economic opportunity? Housing crisis? ISIS? Foreign wars? All of these have roots in plutocracy. Someone(s) is profiting from the system, and those who profit are consistently at the very top of the economic pyramid. And they like it that way. And they want to stay there. And they use their money and influence to do that.

We tend to look at a lot of pieces of the little picture when trying to fix problems. That’s important, but we can’t leave out the big picture issues. In addition, our society is set up to distract us at every turn. We are distracted by important things, and by the meaningless issues that make life fun. Reality TV,  Honey Boo Boo (one of my favorites — your life can’t be worse than theirs, so you can’t stop watching!), and the “news” telling us about all of the great and terrible things that Hollywood celebs are doing and wearing these days. And there are distractions on the political side too: when our new President fixates on size, we pay attention. His hands? The crowd at his inauguration? Numbers at his rallies? All of these things are effectively meaningless in the big picture, and often serve to divert us (purposefully or not) from what’s really going on. More on that soon.

But getting this back on focus — I’m going to continue to look much more actively at the world through this lens. I recently taught a class that was in part centered around this theme, and continue to hone these ideas. As always, please feel free to contribute, argue, etc. Disagreement is important to me, as I don’t think ideas can advance and improve in an intellectual vacuum. Or ignore me. Whichever. But if you’ve read this far, you’re probably a glutton for this kind of ‘punishment’ anyway!

I certainly get distracted too, but will begin a post with the tag [Focus:] anytime it is more or less directly on this central topic.