Thank God We Got Rid of the Men #9
Challenge of the Heads-Down Generation
Thank God We Got Rid of the Men; A Story of Restoration for Planet Earth
#9 of a series of pieces from a text in progress. Publisher inquiries welcome.
Women did not like the changes they saw in their children
Tho men were oblivious, first USA women, then women worldwide, perceived and FELT many changes happen to their own children:
- Rise in infant and maternal mortality,
- Declining quality of K-12 education,
- Declining value of a college degree outside of STEM,
- Class and income disparity at an all-time high,
- Decline of the values of personal growth, personal freedom and opportunity,
- Hopelessness and heads-down posture of generations born since 2000.
Not all of these are easy to document or measure Some are:
INDENT
U.S. infant mortality rate on the rise (2004)
Increase is the first in four decades, says CDC. The nation’s infant mortality rate climbed from 6.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2001 to 7,0 deaths in 2002. CDC analysts had expected another year of declining deaths…
Reversing The Rise In Maternal Mortality (2018)
Katy B. Kozhimannil
… maternal mortality is on the rise again. … In the 1990s the maternal mortality rate in the US began to increase. Between 1987 and 2010 it more than doubled, reaching 16.0 deaths per 100,000 live births. But as the rate ticked upward, the trend was not making headlines. …
By 2010, when I gave birth to my daughter, the US maternal mortality rate was worse than that in fifty-six other countries. I would have been statistically safer giving birth in Egypt, Iraq, Latvia, Mongolia, or Uruguay than here. … https://www.HealthAffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.1013
Early preterm births cause troubling rise in infant mortality: Progress Report (2019)
OHIO ~ The overall infant mortality rate, defined as the number of live-born infants who die before reaching a first birthday per 1,000 live births, was 8.43 last year and rose to 10.1 the first quarter of this year. … The biggest driver of infant death in the region continues to be prematurity and preterm births, followed by birth defects and sleep-related deaths. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2019/04/early-preterm-births-cause-troubling-rise-in-infant-mortality-progress-report.html
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Men didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t acknowledge how much negative change their Frankenstein monsters were creating once loosed into the wild.
Let’s continue outlining the “quiet revolution” from male to female leadership, which in 2120 history books, we say began 2018–2020.
In feminine eyes, it wasn’t only the spectacle of male incompetency at every level, including the highest. At their best, women have passion for positive, Progressive change benefitting the 99%. With their new-found power and influence, “women used collective momentum for good, not for greed.”
INDENT
2013: Age of the Heads-Down Generation
https://jontong.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/the-age-of-the-heads-down-generation/
In the bustling city of Hong Kong, everyone tries to make the most of every second spent on public transportation. The solution is usually attending to some sort of electronics device. … Take a look around the streets and public transportation, people constantly have their gaze fixed upon a lifeless object bringing them endless entertainment.
More disturbing, at least to my point of view, is people reluctant to put down their phones and electronic devices when other important things are going on, such as walking in traffic. People walk with devices in their faces, oblivious to all else, not cognizant of who or what’s around them the slightest bit. … More significantly, they use smartphones to ignore needy people all around us. Everyone is fixated in their own little bubble of self-infatuation.
END INDENT
In the USA, males acknowledged the rise in “smartphone addiction” in the young since 2000. Yes, they imagined “it could be true” a decline of interpersonal engagement was occurring, even between teens of similar ages. Yet as long as men’s stocks were still increasing in value, this did not threaten “males on top.” So there was “nothing to do about it.”
This is how many male Frankenstein monsters were allowed to proliferate.
INDENT
Smartphone and head-down generation in South Korea (2016)
INDENT Hong Kong: People walking fast on the streets, holding up smartphones with high concentration is a common sight. You see this in bus stations, subway stations and coffee stores. When you ask, users say they cannot live without love, but truly, to Korea’s young generation, they cannot live without smartphones. News Asia Channel has done a video report about this habit of Korean and the final conclusion is in two words: Smartphone addiction.
Heads down, eyes on your electronic device, makes more sense in a large city, when you are in a sea of strangers. However the “heads down” youth phenomena goes deeper. Try and talk with these people and you find a good number of them are not simply following their peer’s behavior. They are also unskilled at talking, unskilled at listening, unskilled at hearing, unskilled at keeping up their end of a meaningful or any conversation.
If your people skills are low, as it the case with many people prior to high school graduation, it’s easy to excuse yourself by imagining the world is filled with constant threats of interpersonal conflicts.
The plague of low interpersonal competency skills plagues even many highly educated persons with multiple degrees. Cultural Creatives seem the most immune, those interested in society, how to make it better and how diversity can be a strength.
Most significantly, progressive leaders and organizers, 1972–2018, were among those ignorant of and oblivious to our considerable literature of Best Practices in interpersonal skills and healthy group process. In this period leaders and organizers could barely motivate local voters to vote; let alone, create and sustain local regular meetings of significant numbers of like-minded persons such that community was created and a ready voting block existed when elections came around.
To the average heads down person, up thru 2018, participating in creative projects, requiring interpersonal process, often seemed unsafe, past outcomes repeatedly disappointing. How to create or sustain safe-trustable healthy group process was often obscure or incomprehensible.
end in
From 2120 the solutions to the above are clear — from 2019 — not so obvious.
One of the great advantages we have in our thinking in 2120 is Goethean Holistic Science is mainstream science. Your old science, “hard science,” shrank in importance and significance. It’s now only one-third of science as we know it in 2120.
Reference
Goethean Holistic Science and the Three Sciences We Use Everyday for Holistic Practitioners and Self-Healers: Chapters 19–20 from Balance on All Levels-PACME+Soul Plus Related Essays (2014, 2016).
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While describing and addressing the “heads down generation” is mostly impossible with only “hard science,” Second Oder Science, the challenge is much easier to describe and address using Third and First Orders of Science.
Below is how college professors in the 2030s described to college students the rise and fall of the “heads down generation.”
Collapse of interpersonal competency
rise of interpersonal indecency
Portion of college lecture notes from Group Process 201:
INDENT
From a male perspective the “heads-down generation” was no problem. “Kids are earning companies money, which raises the stock price of companies I hold stock in.”
From the female perspective, the collapse of “male effectiveness in teh world” was part and parcel of a second, perhaps larger collapse. Since the 1990s at least, interpersonal competency was also declining. Interpersonal indecency, deliberately violent language, was increasing.
You’ll know from your study of Third Order Science, such a change is primarily invisible, difficult to measure in Second Order Science terms.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich stooped to incorporate interpersonal indecency into USA politics. He stooped to using false statements, mis-labeling of Regressive Senate bills and attacks subtle and obvious. He normed these as day to day Regressive political tactics.
Collapsing interpersonal competency, imploding politeness, had been deliberately and consciously chosen by male leadership. Everyone, including males, suffered from this Godzilla-sized problem. Yet men were incapable of acknowledging this as a priority to address. So the cancer of violent speech spread.
As long as Team Oligarchy, Team Old Money, was winning, Regressive men simply did not care if people got along well or not. They could not, did not, want to measure this. And so — un measured and not measurable — the problem did not exist — and continued to spread into and replace mainstream culture.
Similarly, Ann Counter and Phyllis Schlafly in the 1990s stooped to turn healthy feminism upside down. They argued forcefully for women to submit to male domination. They honored those women enabling male crimes and indecency.
Donald Duck’s fake presidency did us all a favor. He multiplied hate speech, hate crimes, racial slurs, insults, belittlement. Examples of each became so numerous, to be visible even the casual public noticed their increase.
For 2020s women, the “heads-down generation” became the focus of this problem. They understood when the problem was addressed effectively for current generations, lack of interpersonal competency could be remedied for the next seven generations up-coming.
At the beginning of 2020, we estimate only a few thousand Cultural Creative Women, many fewer men, understood this slow motion disaster. This was about to change. The Big Blue Wave was coming.
The Women In Congress caucus introduced the BluePrint of WE, in 2021, as described in the last piece. BofWE spread to more and more offices of Senators and Representatives. Mass media began taking an interest. The BluePrint of WE book became a 2022 Oprah Book Club book and spiraled up and out from there.
Women In Congress had already made emotional transparency a priority. They developed and shared rhetoric for this. More and more women understood only women were capable of turning around the abysmal state males had left interpersonal competency in.
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These pieces of the longer work are posted online at Medium.com, LinkedIn.com. You can contribute at Patreon.com.
Self-published eBook and paper book expected in late 2019.
