To Change a Life. To Change the World.

 “…she’ll live up to just what you demand of her and no more." -Annie Sullivan, to Helen Keller’s Mother, in The Miracle Worker

The task of educating and retraining a human being when the human has already become an adult is a monumental undertaking. The education process is slow and repetitive at any age, but an adult is an especially difficult pupil if they are steadfastly against the lesson to be learned. This is what we are up against in our need and desire to change our way of life in the US away from an economic and social system that has become unsustainable.

If you have never seen the 1962 film called The Miracle Worker it is well worth looking for. It is the story of blind and deaf Helen Keller as a child and Annie Sullivan, the young visually impaired woman who becomes Helen’s teacher. Helen’s parents seek out a teacher for her as she is becoming more difficult to manage as she gets older. The Keller’s also have a new baby in the home, and they are fearful for the infant’s safety as Helen is completely undisciplined. It may not seem as if capitalism and a blind and deaf child have any factors in common on the surface, but I can assure you that the task of educating a populace that has grown up a certain way, as Helen had been growing up with no rules for behavior, have much in common when you understand that Helen had no frame of reference as to what Annie was trying to teach her any more than most Americans understand the concepts of sharing power and authority when all we have ever known is capitalism.

In the film, Annie’s attempts to gain Helen’s trust and get Helen to accept her authority are hampered by her parents who do not understand Annie’s methods of teaching and want to protect Helen from the difficult lessons that she must understand and have respect for or it will not be possible for her to make the connection that the things Annie is doing all have a meaning and a useful purpose. Each new experience has a true benefit for Helen, but to her, it only seems that there is a new person there who is taking her freedom away. It has been a freedom that literally allows her to bully everyone in the household and get whatever she wants whenever she wants it. The capitalist mentality does not differ very much. Capitalists pay large amounts of money to get their own way such as offering it up to lobby political figures and paying for perks and incentives to assure that things go their way. This is acceptable to the capitalists because they spend all of their working lives in the pursuit of high profits which guarantees them the ability to buy a situation that suits them. Money is gladly given away to assure them the comfortable position that they can only hold by buying it. What socialism wants to teach them, which is sharing and a rethinking of the balance of power in the world, is fought against tooth and nail because rank and entitlement keeps them from having to consider how their desires affect those around them. Empathy has no place in the high stakes pursuit of profit. Superiority is the only barrier between them and the miserable masses who have no choice but to do what they say. Anything less means that you are subject to truly human experiences which are pain, fear, want, hunger, loss, illness, etc. which can be bought in to submission if you keep a tight-fisted control over others. At the bottom of everything is the ability to pretend that you do not have to be human.

At the center of The Miracle Worker is a very lengthy scene at the family breakfast table in the Keller home. Annie is horrified to see how Helen is allowed to walk around the table taking food off everyone’s plates to eat. Annie refuses to let Helen take food from her plate. The chaos that ensues as a result of Helen not being able to help herself to Annie’s breakfast becomes a gigantic contest of wills which goes on for hours necessitating the removal of everyone in the room except student and teacher and all the doors to the room being locked. It is shocking to see how hard Helen will fight in order to keep her power to get what she wants and believes that she is entitled to. Make no mistake, this is what we have coming when the transition comes. Those who have no desire to share are going to be infuriated and uncooperative as hell. Nobody likes to be told that they cannot have something that they want, especially when they have been allowed to take from everyone to suit themselves for a very long time. Strong willed and determined teachers who know the importance of changing what has been for far too long have the task of showing what we must now understand is the way that we reform a corrupt system so that no one is cheated and left out of what is fair. It is our only hope if we mean to guarantee these human rights for the entire family/society. We can expect that there may be no peace until the lessons of how we must now function are learned and understood and put in to practice.

We hope that all of the lessons will eventually be absorbed, as they were with Helen, and we will see order and a peaceful coexistence come from the struggle and pain that is always required of us to adjust to a new way of being, but the rules must be clear and strictly enforced by those who are tasked with teaching them. They must be laws or too many will continue to believe that the rules do not apply to them. Ironically, we already have many laws that should have stopped or curtailed the rampant gorging on the masses that we are experiencing right now. Antitrust laws were put into place many decades ago to stop the “Robber Barons” such as railroad owners and others who made fortunes on the backs of everyone until the Government called a halt to their unfair practices. After that, there was a period when the middle class in this country saw opportunities for better jobs, better wages, and the ability to buy their own homes. People prospered for the first time in a long time. It did not, however, reach all our citizens equally. People of color and many immigrants were not necessarily the beneficiaries of the newfound prosperity. Those laws did not cover everyone and are not being enforced now. It was probably the closest that we ever came to Socialism but it did not last, and as a result we are being taken for just about everything that the corporate fascists can get their grubby hands on from our plates. It is no different from what Helen Keller was doing, but Helen was a child who was never taught not to do it. The corporate masters know full well what they are doing and they know the devastating effect that their behavior is wrecking in our world, but if no one steps in to stop it, it will never change. Many people are fed up and angry about it but without calling in the Annie Sullivans to correct and redirect the behavior this is what we will always have. A set of rules for some and a complete lack of them for others has gotten us to the point where we now stand.

It does not help matters that most of our political leaders come from corporate/capitalist backgrounds. They are well versed in the profit over people mentality that governs just about everything in America, so even though their job is to represent all the people in their states and in the country as a unit, they seem to forget about those of us who are not from their own peer group. Forgetting is easy when you want to keep your position and you depend on the rich influencers to make sure that you do. A total revamping of our political system and a revamping of how we vote for these people is desperately needed as well as in our judicial system which has in many cases turned away from the scales of justice in favor of the few who can afford to tip the scales off balance to favor those who strictly speaking have a minority view but have the assets to stack the deck against the majority view of the citizens. These are situations that prevent any real change in where we now stand, but they must be addressed or the Annie Sullivans coming in to teach will be severely limited in how much they can accomplish as the real Annie Sullivan was in trying to breakthrough to Helen. Helen’s parents were a severe barrier to that breakthrough because of their lack of understanding about their daughter’s needs and how her learning process had to take place. Annie had to move to a separate household to get anywhere with Helen, because as long as they were there to undo whatever successes were built, there was never going to be a true and lasting change in Helen’s behavior. The possibility for a relapse in all that Annie might accomplish with Helen was always a threat as well if Helen’s parents allowed any laxity in the enforcement of the new situation.

To achieve our goals of balancing this country into a place that works for all of us we desperately need a  Miracle Worker. It remains to be seen whether or not we will be able to find one. Valiant attempts at this are being made right now but too many times those who are chosen to lead and to teach are ultimately revealed to have feet of clay or they are sabotaged quickly to prevent them from getting a stronghold on the problems. Annie Sullivan devoted her entire life to the care and teaching of Helen Keller, and as a result Helen went far beyond just learning how to communicate and behave with others. She is remembered and revered to this day because someone dedicated their life to helping her achieve great things. Without that dedication and selflessness, we might never have known about the miracles that were Helen and Annie. Who among us now will try to create such a miracle for America, for the world, and for the planet? It has to be a way of life that is brought to life by those who “recognize a badly spoiled child when they see one”. Capitalism at its core is actually no more than that. It is behavior that was allowed to continue to the point where the household/country could no longer function in peace.