My latest Clarion Ledger piece, published December 8, 2015, 8A.
My latest piece in the Clarion Ledger draws on Aristotle’s insights about friendship, which he called acknowledged reciprocal goodwill. We sure need more of that in Mississippi.
Click here or on the Clarion Ledger logo on the right to read the piece on their Web site.
You can also see a scan of the printed piece on Academia.edu.
People in and around Oxford, MS,
The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA) is now a member and chapter organization. We are founding our chapter in Oxford this academic year and are gathering information from people who might be interested in participating in our chapter. SOPHIA is a national nonprofit that has been around since 1983. Our aim is to use the tools of philosophical inquiry to improve people’s lives and enrich the profession of philosophy through conversation and community building.
If you are interested in learning more or know you’d like to participate in our SOPHIA chapter here in Oxford,
Please fill out this SURVEY.
(It’s short)
We ha
ve plans for a first gathering on Friday, December 11th, to have a short, relaxed conversation on the nature of and challenges for community. Dr. Andrea Houchard will be our invited facilitator, and she has had great success building a chapter in Flagstaff, AZ.
Originally published in the Oxford Eagle on October 28, 2015. Republished with permission.
Lyndy Berryhill, Oxford Eagle.
I’m grateful to Lyndy Berryhill of The Oxford Eagle, who came to our forum with Judge Reeves. She also kindly gave me permission to republish her piece on my page here. Thanks again to the Mississippi Humanities Council and to the College of Liberal Arts for their support for the event! Thanks to Berryhill for coming and letting people know about the event. There’s so much to be proud of in Mississippi. It’s crucial that we talk about that more often. Here’s her piece:
In the wake of racial discussions on campus, the University of Mississippi provided students with a speaker to talk about Mississippi history and racial violence in the state.
District Judge Carlton Reeves has presided over key race and equality cases in Mississippi
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves spoke on “Race and Moral Leadership in the U.S. Judicial System.” Tuesday afternoon in Bryant Hall.
“Mississippi has struggled with its past, but it has also struggled to move forward,” Reeves said.
Reeves famously presided over the racially charged murder of James Craig Anderson and later sentenced his murderers to prison. NPR called his speech at the trial “breathtaking” and it garnered Reeves national media attention. During the forum, Reeves talked about the case and how it was important for people to realize what a hate crime is.
Ventress, (c) U of MS 2010.
He said he believes there is a new Mississippi starting to form with a new generation. A couple decades ago, most of the racial progress that is present today would be unthinkable. He said to continue that progress, students have to continue to have open discussions and remain open-minded.
“The response to him was better than I could have hoped for. The students could relate to Judge Reeves, because he’s from Mississippi,” said Eric Thomas Weber, associate professor of public policy leadership.
“Students often feel that politics is uncooperative, primarily a battle between competing interests. Sometimes, however, we can find shining examples of virtuous people and leaders making the right decisions,” he said.
Weber routinely brings in visiting speakers relevant to the current news cycle. With the help of the Mississippi Humanities Council, Weber brought Reeves to visit his class and speak to a packed open forum.
Reeves first arrived in time for a lunch with public policy leadership majors and then he joined a philosophy of leadership class.
“Over the last few years, as I wrote ‘Uniting Mississippi,’ the racially charged murder of James Craig Anderson offered the most troubling recent example of injustice here that is rooted in underlying cultural divides and hatred,” Weber said.
After he wrote the book, Weber came across Judge Reeves’ speech from the sentencing in the case.
“It truly took my breath away,” Weber said. “I was so moved that I immediately decided to write Judge Reeves to tell him. I mentioned in my note that if he were ever willing to come to my philosophy of leadership course, we would love to have him come to the university.”
Within a matter of hours, Reeves replied that he would be honored.
Weber said Reeves is an example of hope for progress in Mississippi.
“He is also an inspiration for our students to look beyond partisanship to the character of our leaders,” Weber said. “I couldn’t ask for more from the visit of an invited guest.”
Reposted here with permission from The Oxford Eagle.
or "Governor, Take Down This Flag," in The Clarion Ledger, September 20, 2015, 2C.
My piece, “Mr. Bryant, Take Down the Flag,” came out in The Clarion Ledger this morning. In the printed version, the title is “Governor, Take Down this Flag.” For the next week or two, please head to the electronic version of the piece on the newspaper’s site. You can download and print a PDF of the article by clicking on the image of the printed version.
I’ll soon post the full article on my site. For now, be sure to check out my blogpost arguing that “Racism Defies the Greatest Commandment.”
Originally published in The Clarion Ledger, May 14, 2013, 9A.
The harsh treatment of prisoners in the U.S. causes much controversy, yet in our public schools, institutionalized
violence is commonplace.
In April, the Hattiesburg American reported that corporal punishment declined in Mississippi schools between 2007 and 2012 from more than 58,000 reported instances to around 39,000.
The use of corporal punishment varies greatly by school district. For the Lafayette County School District’s roughly 2,700 students, there were seven recorded cases of corporal punishment in the 2009-2010 school year and none the following year. By contrast, the Quitman County School District enrolls just under 1,300 students, yet recorded 1,594 instances of corporal punishment in the 2010-2011 academic year, which is only about 180 school days.
In the U.S., all 50 states permit corporal punishment in domestic settings. For public and private schools, however, only 19 states still practice it, while in Iowa and New Jersey it is illegal to perform in schools.
Iowa is a helpful state to use in comparison with Mississippi, since it is largely rural and has a comparable population size. Of course, Iowa has its problems, with seven schools districts named “dropout factories” in a 2007 Associated Press report. The same report called 44 of Mississippi’s schools “dropout factories.”
At best, corporal punishment in schools is not helping Mississippi. At worst, it is part of the problem.
According to studies, most parents find spankings in the home to be acceptable. It is important to distinguish parenting from schooling, however, and to watch out for institutional excesses. The 1980 federal case Hall v. Tawney said that excess corporal punishment in schools could violate a student’s “right to ultimate bodily security, the most fundamental aspect of personal privacy, (which) is unmistakably established in our constitutional decisions as an attribute of the ordered liberty that is the concern of substantive due process.”
Not all spankings in schools might be called excessive, of course, yet cases reported on in the Hattiesburg American raise serious concern. In 2011, 14-year-old Trey Clayton of Independence High School was paddled so severely that he fainted, “fell face-first onto the concrete floor … (and) had five shattered teeth and a lacerated chin,” according to reporter Marquita Brown.
Beyond legal concerns and the tragically severe cases, there are strong reasons to end institutionalized corporal punishment.
Bust of Socrates, Plato’s teacher.
First, students are compelled to be in school, and with good reason. Democratic societies must educate citizens to be self-governing. Yet Plato and other philosophers believed correctly, I think, that learning cannot take hold by compulsion. Socrates argued that “nothing taught by force stays in the soul.”
Compulsory schooling can address Plato’s worry, however, by showing students the value of education. It is vital to create an environment in which education is welcoming and inviting. Corporal punishment has the reverse effect.
Second, corporal punishment teaches students that when confronted with a challenge, adults use violence rather than reason to achieve our ends. It solidifies “school-to-prison pipelines” that the Justice Department is combating.
In Mississippi, we know that culture matters and that many of our schools are struggling. Corporal punishment is only one element of a culture which discourages students. Ending the practice, however, would contribute meaningfully to the reconstruction of an encouraging and positive culture of achievement in education.
Eric Thomas Weber is assistant professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of three books, including Democracy and Leadership (2013). He is representing only his own views. Follow @EricTWeber on Twitter. Visit EricThomasWeber.org.
Steve Earle & the Dukes, in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center, have written & released a beautiful and moving song telling Mississippi “It’s Time.” Beyond writing a great tune, Earle has also done something he’d probably be too humble to admit. Through a work of art, he has contributed to moral leadership. He has creatively called Mississippi officials to change a policy. He leans heavily and justifiably on a number of Southern and Mississippi values. He’s right. Mr. Earle & the Dukes, thank you.
I’m working on a book called A Culture of Justice. It’s about the cultural conditions necessary for justice. It’s also about the cultural forces that can lead to oppression and its maintenance or to justice and its preservation. When journalists started reporting to the world with photos of the injustices in the American South, southerners were shamed. The rest of the world was also appalled and demanded change and the observance of the law.
When it comes to Mississippi, some folks are right when they say that just changing a flag alone won’t change much. However, the things that need to change are impeded by attitudes and moral injuries that prevent progress. I wrote elsewhere about “What a Flag Has to Do with Justice.” In short, it can do harm, even if indirectly or in a roundabout way, in its contribution to the maintenance of an unjust culture.
The wonderful thing about culture and its artifacts, however, is that they also include solutions. Earle’s song is a great example of a way to show pride in one’s family and home, while recognizing the mistakes from society’s past. The song is complex. It weaves in norms and sounds that many Mississippians love, even if they were painful in their own ways too. To understand Earle, you have to recognize that he’s trying to reach people in Mississippi and wants reasonably to be proud of what we should be and not of what he shouldn’t be.
I find the video moving and brilliant. I hope you’ll share it widely and tell our public officials: “it’s time.”
Originally published in The Clarion Ledger, September 6, 2015, 2C
Click for a printable PDF scan.
Mississippians have been entangled in a deep philosophical debate about education funding for months, though attention has focused largely on technical details. Ballot initiative 42 that will be decided this November asks: “Should the state be required to provide for the support of an adequate and efficient system of free public schools?” If voters pass the initiative, they would be demanding an amendment to the state Constitution making that requirement explicit.
People who want voters to choose “yes” explain that such a requirement should be enforceable in the courts. Without that, a parent would have no recourse when his or her child must attend a chronically underfunded and failing school.
In their involvement of the courts, the proponents of 42 have made a crucial move for taking Mississippians’ educational obligation seriously. As the Legislature has continually failed to fund education even to the level of basic adequacy, the proponents of 42 are right to demand a check on that negligence.
The Legislature proposed an alternate initiative, 42A, which asks: “Shall the Legislature be required to provide for the establishment and support of an effective system of free public schools?” On the surface, that sounds sensible, as it is the Legislature’s responsibility to allocate proper funding. If we obligate the state instead, however, then it makes sense that the courts would be able to protect citizens’ rights, forcing the state to fulfill its obligations. 42A omits reference to the courts and calls for an “effective system of free public schools upon such conditions and limitations as the Legislature may prescribe.”
The problem people have is with the Legislature. We have had budget surpluses and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to a rainy day fund. Officials have additionally been proposing tax cuts. At the same time, the Legislature continues to severely underfund public education.
The critics of 42A are on to something when they point out that the Legislature already has the control that the alternate initiative has in mind.* 42A amounts to a rejection of the idea that the Legislature should be checked and held accountable in the courts when it fails to fully fund education. In that sense, it denies that the people of Mississippi have a real obligation to provide access to an adequate education for all our citizens.
Given the confusing technical details of the two proposals, it is vital that we consider seriously whether and why we have the obligation that 42 suggests. That philosophical question is crucial, since if we have such an obligation, it cannot be optional and contingent on the Legislature’s fluctuating will.
When the state has an obligation, citizens have corresponding rights. If we believe we have an obligation to provide access to an adequate education, we must give people a meaningful mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligation.
No one has seriously denied the idea implicit in initiative 42 — that the citizens of Mississippi should support and provide access to a free and adequate public education for all of our young people. We should consider the question for the sake of argument, however, because it illustrates why 42A falls short of meaningful reform. What reasons can we give to an imagined skeptic of our obligation to provide adequate, if not good or excellent, public education?
There are many reasons, but four stand out:
• Self-governance requires education. According to Thomas Jefferson, education is essential for democracy. It is necessary for wise governance, for peace, and for political legitimacy.
• Education for all is a requirement of equal citizenship. Mississippi has a troubled history. Today, reasonable and responsible officials rightly explain that those parts of our history are not what Mississippi values anymore. After James Craig Anderson was killed in a racially motivated murder in Jackson, U.S. Attorney John Downy argued that “the actions of these defendants who have pled guilty… do not represent the values of Mississippi in 2012.” I agree. At the same time, in the 44 Mississippi school districts that were labeled “dropout factories” in 2007, only a small portion of the students we were failing were white. Overwhelmingly those schools are made up student bodies 75-100 percent of which are minority kids.
• Inadequate education is one of the most powerful forms of oppression. Eighty percent of people incarcerated in the U.S. have not graduated from high school. As so many of our schools have been failing or at-risk of failing, we have been perpetuating the history that we say we want to leave behind. Republicans and Democrats from all over Mississippi are sick and tired of these impediments to the state’s progress. Educational failure is one of our most obstructive problems. To redress our history of injustice and our present challenges, we must stop accepting gross inadequacy that systematically holds our citizens back and reaps division, rather than unity.
• Expectations of responsibility depend upon personal development. In America and especially in Mississippi, we value personal responsibility. At the same time, we don’t demand rent from babies. We know that personal responsibility and self-respect are developed over time and through education. If we expect people to prize freedom and independence, we cannot assume that citizens are born as responsible adults. In youth, we are all dependent and in need of an education.
Education is both a necessity for democracy and a value in itself. If our government is intended to protect the pursuit of happiness, that protection must be extended to everyone. If we are obligated to ensure that all Mississippians are afforded at least an adequate education, furthermore, then we must provide the people with a mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligations. Rights and obligations are not optional, which is why we need the courts for their enforcement. That is also why 42 could lead to real progress in education and why we must choose it instead of more of the same failure.
Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of “Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South” (Sept. 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Twitter @EricTWeber.
For a week or two, The Clarion Ledger will have the text version of the article on their Web site here.
* The original article included a next sentence here that was edited in such a way that did not capture what was intended. I have omitted the new version from the text here. You can still see it in the scan, however.
This week, while my Philosophy of Leadership class has been covering Plato’s Republic & the story of Gyges’s ring, I was presented with a Twitter-style version of the story. In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates is talking with people about justice. People only act justly if they can’t get away with injustice, say Socrates’s friends. Well, in today’s world, it turns out that if you can get away with breaking the rules, you can get a lot of Twitter followers quickly. Some high profile people break those rules and get away with it. And, some don’t get away with it.
I am convinced of the need for more public philosophy and feel compelled to contribute as best I can. I’d like to reach more people with the messages that I think need to be said and heard. Apparently you can reach more folks and more will follow you if you first pay a service to generate 10,000 fake followers for you over a few weeks’ time. Why? People with lots of followers are more likely to get followed in return. They’re also more likely to be proposed to other people as good candidates for following, speeding the cycle. What’s the catch? It goes against Twitter policy to pay for fake activity, including following or posting.
I’ve been told that Twitter does not police that, however. They don’t want spammers who sell stuff by automatic “fake” activity of messaging, and they clamp down on that. If that’s true — if they don’t police fake follower-buying — then it’s ok to do, right?
Yes, I photoshopped this.
Imagine that a stretch of highway is to be policed by an office that is underfunded. It can only police that stretch of highway from January to September. Does that mean that for three months it’s ok to drive 60 miles over the speed limit? There’s no policing, so what’s wrong with driving over 100 mph? My point is that the fact that something isn’t policed doesn’t mean that it’s thereby ok to do. Also, Plato’s Socrates would say that the policing factor only gets at the extrinsic value of just action, not the intrinsic.
Extrinsic consequences can tell you something, though, or so it seems, according to the modern-day idea of a newspaper test. The question is whether it would still be ok to do what you’re planning if it were to be featured on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. That is an extrinsic test. It asks what would happen as a consequence if someone were to find you out. Your reputation could be damaged. You could go to jail. Other bad consequences could ensue from doing the wrong thing. BUT, what if you knew it couldn’t end up in the newspaper tomorrow?
Plato tells us the story of Gyges’s ring. The story says that a man goes into a chasm in the ground and finds a hollow bronze horse in the chasm. In it, there is a dead man wearing nothing but a jeweled ring. That’s right, nothing but that. Philosophers I know have forgotten that there’s a naked guy in the story. A dead naked guy.
Anyway, the explorer, now a ring richer from taking from a corpse, finds out accidentally that when he turns the ring around, he becomes invisible and can do whatever he wants. He can get away with anything. In that case, the Devil’s advocates in Plato’s story tell Socrates that the invisible man would do whatever he wanted, whether just or not, if he could certainly get away with it.
Socrates argues that justice is not only good for the extrinsic rewards that it brings when it does, but also for its intrinsic value. So, even if you had that ring, you should act justly if you want to be happy and live a good life. Your soul is healthy when you would act justly even if you could have gotten away with injustice.
The newspaper test today is partly about the threat that you will get caught, but it can also help to convince us about what is right and wrong even if you got away with it. If what you are planning to do would look terrible when detailed for the public in the newspaper tomorrow, that’s an indication that it’s the wrong thing to do. There are some unique exceptions to that, which I think deserve their own post, but for the most part, I think that the test is helpful. If you are looking to benefit personally and in a way that is unjust, don’t do it! If to do what is just comes with a cost to reputation, that’s a different story.
Sometimes people’s right to privacy means you can’t disclose information that would explain your actions or decisions. Or, revealing information might put one’s troops in danger. In those cases, you take the insults to your character because it’s the right thing to do, when necessary for justice.
What’s wrong with the Twitter story? At least three things, if not more: 1) If you are buying Twitter followers, you are violating Twitter’s policy, going against the stated norms of a social medium. 2) You are creating a deception, making yourself look like you have a reputation that you lack. 3) As there are legitimate and non-deceptive ways of growing your following quickly, through honest and open paid promotions, you are depriving Twitter of one of the few things that earn the company money.
Photo by Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons), 2012.
Buying Twitter followers is cheap, it turns out. $70 can buy you 10,000 “followers.” Why not do it? One answer is the newspaper test. What would it look like if people found out that’s what you did? What if it were on the front page?
Newt Gingrich knows the answer to that question. It’s not good.
In this case, I think we can safely say that if it would look terrible to do something that is a deception, it’s probably intrinsically a bad thing to do also — whether or not you can get away with it.
Oh, and by the way, follow me on Twitter and “like” my Facebook author page! 
On returning home from Germany, I was startled to hear a voicemail from a white supremacist campaigning for President. It repeated the old trope that there is a genocide being perpetrated on the white race. In the United States, we often throw around words like “Nazi” and “genocide.” Seinfeld’s funny “Soup Nazi” story is one thing, but ridiculous demonizing of political opposition is another. The Iowa Tea Party offered one blatant example, but so do national commentators warning of “liberal fascism” or labeling conservatives “Nazis.” We should sober up and remember what real genocide looks like.
In Democracy and Leadership, one of the key virtues of democratic leadership I wrote about is moderation. Today people so often dismiss moderation, seeing it as a weakness of will, as a lack of principled character. I find that view tragic, as it inspires such polarization that even the Federal government was shut down in 2013, despite the fact that the world is watching and the credit rating for U.S. debt was downgraded in 2011. Unstable societies are risky investments, as are unjust societies.
Moderation proves to be one of the deepest challenges for democratic societies, I argued more recently in my forthcoming Uniting Mississippi. Moderation is the virtue that aims to achieve unity. If you can’t moderate differences, unified groups tear apart and become several, rather than one. At the same time, of course, there can be delusional, hateful, or simply ridiculous ideas about unity. One of them is the white supremacist’s outlook.
The white supremacist thinks that there’s a need for greater unity among white people as a race. It is one thing when a group has systematically been targeted and oppressed, such as in slavery, the Holocaust, or Apartheid. Such group solidarity in those conditions is understandable, for people need to express pride and unity in their identities as survivors of horrible atrocities and continuing prejudice. Even in such cases, however, no reasonable group calls for purity of its race. Only white supremacists believe that interracial marriage is a threat to a race.
A little over a week ago, I had the sobering opportunity to visit a real genocidal institution. The Dachau concentration camp was built for holding around 5-6 thousand imprisoned workers. By the end of World War II, it held 32,000. To deal with the mass of people and to quell their number, the Germans had created gas chambers, which could kill large groups at once. To avoid resistance to entering the gas chamber at Dachau, the Germans had labeled the door “Brausebad” – “Shower.”
Once people were killed, they were moved to the ovens, photographed in the featured image above. Part of what was so disturbing in all of this was the thoughtful reasoning that went into controlling people and disposing of them. To convince people that the “Brausebad” really was a shower, and not a gas chamber, the Nazis had installed false shower heads. For the visitors like myself, the covers were removed from many of the shower heads, revealing a closed cone above. There was no water pipe. This was simply the illusion meant to make it easier to slaughter people. Here is a photo of the covered and uncovered shower heads, side by side:
Having visited the truly disturbing and sobering Dachau camp, all I could think was that the white supremacists campaigning for President are tragically misguided and absurd. Some people are so lacking in sense that they actually believe that white folks are under threat as a group. The level of such nonsense is deeply saddening.
The call I received was eerie, partly because the voice didn’t sound quite right. It was a woman’s voice, and it was somewhat realistic, but you could tell that the message was one of those recordings generated by a computer voice – just a pretty good one. It read a message that began with formulaic language I have received before from white supremacists. It said that there are countries for these kinds of people and those, so there should also be countries for white people.
Adding to the absurdity of the call is the fact that the United States is a highly religious country. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan now denies that it is a hate group. They have long called themselves Christians. It is long past time to remind people that such views call for seeing all people as kin, as children of the same God. Using the Christian religion in service of hate or disunity is a gross perversion, yet as I have argued, even in the most religious state in the U.S., Mississippians are recalcitrant even when religious leaders call for progress and unity.
We need to take the aim of unity seriously. We need to stop using demonizing language lightly and foolishly. We also need more people to see the effects of such crazy polarization and disunity, which have led even to campaigns for the Presidency from white supremacists. We don’t need delusions of genocide, when there are disturbing and tragic examples of the real thing.
To close, I thought about sharing with you a photo of a mountain of dead, skeleton-thin bodies. Instead, I’ll leave you with a photo I snapped at the Jewish memorial at Dachau, which was immensely beautiful and moving for me.
One of the remarkable things rarely considered among average museum-goers is the somewhat unbelievable fact that nations in the Western world have gone to places like Egypt and taken out of sacred and historical landmarks beautiful cultural treasures. It is true that archaeologists get permits. It is true that the explorer who found Tutankhamun’s tomb spent the better part of a decade looking. It is true that he secured and invested somewhat incredible financial resources to have upwards of 100 people helping him to dig and to search for years. There was enormous work that went into finding Tut’s tomb. Nevertheless, I can’t help but appreciate the point of view which says that relevant artifacts belong to the people and region from which they came.
Of course, I also appreciate the view which says that the labor one puts into a work makes it partly yours. Tut’s tomb may have remained lost to this day without the investment of time and money that helped find it. The issue would be less troubling for me if Egypt were not a quite poor country, compared with the U.K., and had the U.K. not had troubling colonialist practices of domination and exploitation.
I am not experienced nor a scholar on the subject of works of art or national treasures like the ones I’m referring to. I am studying issues of culture, however, and the ways in which they enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. I have yet to explore the connection between my work and the excavation and relocation of artifacts like those from Tut’s tomb. I will simply have to leave for my own part further work to do in thinking about international relations and the idea of past harms from colonialism.
I do not know what all the permits that the relevant archaeologists obtained legally allowed them to do. My sense is that what they did might have been legal, but if you consider the influence of colonialism on the politics of the day, it is reasonable to wonder whether in fact the relevant laws were reasonable or legitimate. As MLK said, an unjust law is no law.
Thinking through such matters nevertheless is accompanied for me by a fascination about the past and the substance of the find from Ancient Egypt. I suppose that what makes me marvel this time around, beyond the incredible historical artifacts, is the extent to which people felt comfortable, whether it was technically legal or not, excavating precious treasures from a country and culture and then exporting them to places like the U.K., Germany, France, and the United States, among other places.
Again, I’ve not studied these matters, but am thinking aloud, or at least via a quick blogpost. What does it mean to respect a culture? What does justice require in such cases? What resolution can we hope for when it comes to serious conflicts about historical treasures, heritage, and the ownership of cultural artifacts. Laws are sometimes unjust, so even good faith efforts to get permission can be of limited help. At the same time, some people did invest huge sums of money and enormous amounts of time to locate such treasures in Egypt, long before there was air conditioning (which to me sounds simply unbearable).
I don’t know what more to say about it, other than that we need to respect a) Egypt, b) its culture, and c) the people who dedicated their lives to finding amazing historical and artistic treasures. All deserve some degree of consideration. If any friends care to enlighten me about present practices, laws, or conflicts on such subjects, I’d be quite interested. Share this to social media and comment on these ideas, if you like, or reach out to me directly.