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Edited on Sat Sep-27-08 02:20 PM by SoCalDem
This whole Wall Street Debacle is just another "clue" to us all.
The warp-speed of our lives is at the heart of the "problem". We have been cultivated to believe that we must always GROW, always crave MORE, BIGGER, BETTER, SHINIER...at any cost.
America has believed its own press for far too long. Our "experts" make up statistics all the time. We are told routinely that we are the most generous, the smartest, the most prosperous, the healthiest, and yet none of that is true.
Most Americans live with TWO truths....the truth they see every day where they live and the "truth" they see & hear on TV.
We have always been "major-urban" and "rural-small town" and although small town people now have access to more than they used to, their mindset has not changed all that much since the 40s & 50s.. They are the LAST to see much real progress, and the first to experience a serious downturn in the economy, since they live on the fringe...
"Government" has a vested interest in growth at any cost. The "bigger" things get, the more complicated they get, and the greater the need for more legislation and more government hiring to oversee that growth (even though very little real oversight happens).
Bigger companies mean higher paid and more lobbyists are available to donate MORE money to campaigns.
Workers during the Industrial Revolution were told that machines would lighten their workload, and give them more leisure time...It did..The problem was that leisure time turned out to be unemployment, since fewer workers were needed once machines took over many of the more mundane tasks.
In the 20' s& 30s, workers were told that the automobile would provide them with an easier life, and give them mobility. It did, but it also created whole new industries that fouled the air they breathed, and put a whole lot of people on the move to areas that were fragile and not all that hospitable to the farming that followed.. Over-farming, led to the Dust Bowl and the demise of many of them.
In the 50's & 60's we were told that computers would some day make our lives and jobs easier. I dearly love my computer, but truthfully, once many jobs were switched from pencil-on-paper or people face-to-face, it made it quite easy to find someone across the world, who would work for a lot less, to do those jobs.
Every "advancement" has come with its own "destruct" button built into it.
Malls and discount centers were wondrous to people when they first showed up, but those "big-boxes" and the stores held within them, were owned by people elsewhere, and all the money poured into them, did not stay in the community where it was spent.
The local businesses that had once managed to satisfy all the needs and wants of the community, were suddenly no longer "good enough", and many people went from being proprietor of their own business, to hourly-paid sales clerk.
Advertising has groomed us to want more and more and enough is never REALLY enough. Big business has to grow bigger and bigger, so we must continue to buy and buy and buy some more...even if we cannot afford it...and more and more of us can no longer afford to keep buying.
We have houses, FULL to the brim with "stuff" and the only solution to that is to buy even BIGGER houses, so we can buy more stuff. The bigger the house, the bigger the payment, so many people are paying thousands every month so their dog & cat have a great place to lounge in all day, as they sit stuck in traffic and huddled in a cubicle at work..and their kids grow up in daycare with strangers, or wear keys around their necks so they can hang out with the dog and cat for 3-4 hours until tired-Mom and tired-Dad show up with KFC or pizza, sometime around 7PM.
Most of us no longer even know HOW to live simply. Our lives , and expenses have spun out of control . We have "stuff" that we can no longer repair or service ourselves (even if we wanted to or had the time to). Things we watch, listen to, or use to call each other, often come with complicated long-term contracts, and we are always searching for better "deals" and more sophisticated "features", even though most of us either work too much to have time to really use them much, or we end up unemployed and unable to even afford them.
The bind we find ourselves in, is this.. We have allowed ourselves to be taken in, and while we were "sleeping", the rest of the world has caught up with us, and in many cases, passed us up entirely.
When we left "Main Street" in the dust, we gave the corporations permission to leave US in the dust too, if the price was right.
We allowed our labor to be diminished in value, to the point that now our economy is 70% "service".. This only works as long as enough of us have the "extra" money for all that "servicing".
In less than 40 years, we went from being the breadbasket of the world, and the major supplier of "things" to the world...to an importer of food (costly to us and the environment, in many ways), and importer of things we used to make here, but no longer do.
A relative few have gotten incredibly rich from this whole change-over, but millions more have gotten poorer and sicker from it. The people we hire to look out for our well-being, have sold out to their corporate-funders, and while they have free rein to speculate and enrich themselves, the taxpayers are always called upon to "repair" their damage they do to the economy every 20 years or so. This is all done while we , the people, are told to stand alone, be resposnsible, look out for ourselves, plot our own journey, be resourceful, be entrepreneurial, take responsibility for our own actions.
It may be too late to unwind now, and I truly fear for the younger ones among us. The unwinding will come..it always does, and I probably will be gone when it happens, but I'm not sure that our country will survive in a fashion we would recognize when it's all done..
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