I take this phrase to be (most often) YAN mindless actually Heartless shibboleth which only *seems* to be beneficent. For just one angle, there's a presumption there which is a problem also with the banal interpretation of the so-called Golden Rule:

It is NOT sane "to do unto others as you would wish done (to you)". Is it not obvious why? You might be a loonie / Puritan / Calvinist -- maybe self-flagellation is Your neurotic Thing. A better Rule might be, for those who imagine they actually can help.. another [a rather basic existential and metaphysical Question, at the highest of scales]: ~"do unto another as s/he would wish done". We rarely enquire as to That. N'est ce p\ufffds, mon ch\ufffdre?

But as to the children: our highest hope might be that they shall live in a less superstitious, far less violent and possession-besotted society. Since we don't know how to bring that about *for ourselves*, we see that these children shall have to supersede our tired modes of thought, salvage and resurrect Language from the ruinations of advertainment and: innovate. Evolve!

We can't 'teach' that; they shall have to evolve and mature via learning how it is that one acquires authentic self-knowledge - or turn out just like US. The usual way (the poor bastards turn out).

My advice to children would be umm unusual, since my view of the 'daily illusion' isn't even close-to mainstream and in many ways opposite to the prevailing mindset. Our present 'culture' is a death-culture; it could kill All of us.. We have that techno-capability and many deranged ones Would use it; some can hardly wait..

As to advice -about- children? [Hah!] I'd go with the self-advice ignored by legions of allopathic physicians: First, do no harm.

But it's all selfish, in the end: It is the nature of the 'authentic human' (in the sense used by Joseph Campbell, for ex.) to cooperate much more than compete, to build much more than to destroy (yet that is essential too; cf. Siva - often the old must vanish to make way for the new). Helping a child work this out for Him/Herself is part of one's own actual Living, ie the Act is 'selfish' too (!) Talk about yer recursion n'such..

(And you can never 'tell' someone much about anything at all near-to 'Truth', anyway; the fatal and root-flaw of every Corp. Religion, but particularly of the tiresome and sanctimonious evangelizers IMhO)

Save the Cheeldrun! then:
do NOT abuse them! do not inculcate in them Your Own limited ken and myopic view; help them to recognize that they are Creators, that we are each God-like and.. someday we shall Make It So and cease behaving like a marauding pack of $-hyenas, strung-out on escapist Action movies of dead and dying body parts, and dedicated to hoarding as much crap as we can extort from [all the others]. Toys are for the very young: merely to teach the possibilities of 'play' -- which is what real Life is: A Play. (We could really let them in on this, y'know?)

A short while ago, these comments would lead directly to a pyre - as many would wish today, if they had the power to impose. Ashcroft and his fear-filled coterie come to mind. Death to the assassins of spirit (or something)


Ashton Hereticals LLC, LLD, DDOS

PS - re 'sacrificing for the future'. I do not understand future. The past is only in our flawed and demonstrably disconnected memory; the future lives in imagination only. Folks have been tryin to tell us for thousands of years: only *now* is sorta real / surely more-so than the idea of 'time' is.

[See? nobody can Tell anybody Anything worth telling. Groucho got it.]

And it is.. in civilized countries, those who deal with $-matters, costs as all must -- but are not obsessed with making every single pharm-chem and peripheral supplier obscenely rich: for every aspirin. (The perhaps last? often effective post-patent-scam 'drug' we'll see).

Still, and before the above might occur in the US, I think that the hegemony of the AMA - as much a Political Corporation as any of the other usual suspects - must be broken. {somehow}

It is not that allopathic medicine is perfectly unsuitable for actual maintenance of health via our cockamamie concept of treating the symptoms of disease. It is that, in mine and the opinions of millions worldwide: there is something fatally flawed in the way we condition wannabe medicos, who are rote-conditioned to seek a pharm-chem solution for Every office call. Yada & yada. This 'paradigm' battle is hardly new - but nowhere in the world is terminal Pigheadedness as rife as in our Corporatocracy.

At any rate.. I don't think even our bloated Corp dominated approach to all matters concerning real life -- can much longer sustain the horrendous burden of "making health care Profitable" -- with the same class-delineated pay scales. We are simply blind to the possibility of running such an enterprise on *salary* and without the Big Gold Ring of some participants being 'worth' $1000/hr. while the massive daily care is relgated to $7.50/hr workers: often WITHOUT any health care of their own. Much is siphioned-off into the Armani-suited drones of Insurance, the longest-running Econ-scam of all time.

ie the Murican System (as in Edu and so many other areas) is so fucking broken.. it's not even Wrong.

Fie on Stupidity; specially Institutionalized Stupidity set in concrete from decades of non-thought. What our health system needs is an Advocate of the perspicuity of a (Ben Tilly's find) [link|http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Gatto.html| John Gatto]. Instead we get fucking indoctrinated Econ-theoreticians or failed University students who couldn't make it is a Gym instructor - so went for an MBA. No brains or heart required, merely cupidity at its most primitive level.

Luck to us all. Revolution is hard, and we have become soft as McJellyfish swimming in the Mall aquarium. Should we reclaim Language, the bafflegab of Econ-minds could be dispatched along with its tawdry definitions of The Good life\ufffd.


Ashton

(And were ours not such a Perpetual Death-fear culture, with roots in lugubrious Puritanism, that HUGE balloon payment.. whereby the terminal will Pay Any Price for another 10 minutes of laboured breathing -- would still occur -- but not nearly to the degree we budget for now. But that's quite another thread. ;-)