I think there have been studies that have shown that in some cases the gang has replaced the family.  It comes down to a cultural question:  Who is responsible for raising children?  Historically, it’s been the family; and the family within the tribe; and the tribe within the village.  One of the premises I just read about in A View from the Center of the Universe is that there’s pretty good evidence that 150 people is about the right number of people to work on a project; after it gets larger than that, it becomes too confusing.  One of the goals of civilization is to broaden that.  I believe there should be billions of people all working towards a named goal, which is peace.

Peace may mean one thing to me and another thing to someone else, but in a way it’s like what they say about pornography:  You know it when you see it.  I think we know what peace is when we see it, but there are so many different factors that come into how we live as a people.  With all members of a family working—sometimes 2, 3, 4 jobs per household—and when the children get of age, they start working at a low-paying job.  How can we have a loving, functioning, teaching family in those conditions?  That’s one of the things that should be explored in this quest for peace.  Can we have peace when the children are more or less on their own without any real options beyond struggling just to survive?  If kids are left by themselves, that’s where the power of the gang comes from, because it replaces the family:  Everyone must dress the same way, act the same way, listen to the same music.  In some cases it’s a necessity for people to join gangs because if they veer too far out of the gang mentality, they get the shit kicked out of them or get killed.

In my speeches I have sometimes been chided because I don’t have answers, I only have questions.  But I think now that some of the answers have to be invented, tried out, with some risks taken.  It takes more than one person saying, “This is the way it should be!”  You can only do that when you have all the guns and power.  People will follow you because they know if they don’t, they’re going to get killed.  When I was in Russia, where they outlawed religion for 50 years, there were 10,000 people going to church on a Sunday morning.  All these people were closet church-goers, but the human tendency is to keep your mouth shut when somebody has a gun pointed at your head.

The New Los Alamos, the coming-together of people for peace, is going to be about trying different things to address the great problems of the world.  I’ve often thought that sometimes we take an easy solution, and then we form an opinion about it.  I think if we were Christians, and Christ himself came down and said something, there’d be a pretty good percentage who would make it into something else, because we have selective hearing.  We hear what we want to hear, we judge when we want to judge.  People always seem to be looking for a reason to either like or hate somebody.  A great lawyer friend of mine used to say, “If you went out and murdered somebody, all your friends would say, ‘He was out of his mind; he didn’t mean to do it!’  And all the people who didn’t like you would say, ‘Hang the son-of-a-bitch immediately!’”

I’ve always thought to myself that the great unexplored space is inside of us.  I believe that entering into that great space is one of the scariest things you’ll ever do, because when you’re in that space, you really see yourself as you are.  I don’t know if that’s really possible for the human being to be their own critic.  It’s easier to blame Hitler or Stalin than it is to blame yourself.  But Hitler and Stalin wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if the people hadn’t allowed it.

That's a long answer to your short but excellent question.  Thanks for your participation in the blog,
Matt