I am just beavering away, trying to live my life. I watch the news to see what is coming and attempt to predict which way the train is going in order to dodge. That is all.
I have a running bet with Locutius. I am saying that the US will not exist as we knew it in 1997 (when the bet was made) by 2015. In my mind the bet has already been won. He still hasn't ponied up the beer.
But that is the extent of my prediction. I don't really see any apocalypse coming. Just a readjustment of lifestyles to something sustainable (read here: Poor). What we were striving for was never really possible. A nation of people living like ancient kings never had the requisite underpinnings to keep such a thing going. What happened in the US was a systematic looting of the future to fund current excesses. All of the theories of the ever-expanding middle class and the eradication of poverty were pipe dreams that were unsupported by reality.
Our political dialog consists of little more than shifting blame and concentration of wealth. The general population, led by the oligarchs, appears to enjoy nothing better than blaming the poor and the meek for accepting alms. The self-made of the tea party bully the poor and tell them that they must take less that they are undeserving of the small pittance received. The trillions poured into the coffers of the wealthy are not mentioned.
The worship of wealth and the material has found its temple here in the US. We loathe the bankers that rape us, but the great bulk of the population would give away their children to the the rapist to be allowed a minuscule share of the crumbs. We have made the blindness of market capitalism a shibboleth, the ramifications of the system, with its inexorable march toward plutocracy a tenet of faith rather than an awkward symbol of original sin that the system truly represents.
Maybe on this day we ought to take time to know our place in the universe. Not as perfect children made by God to take what we wish, but rather sinners redeemed by a savior.
2 comments:
Ugh... Reading that just makes me want to "borrow" a sailboat and head for Pogo Pogo all the more...
I agree except that I think that there are externalities that keep nudging us closer to that cliff called collapse.
I was reading this weekend about North Carolina before the American Revolution. NC actually had a revolt just a little bit prior to the full blown one in Allamance County.
It appears that there were two groups that were mad at the British. The coastal communities (the oligarchs of the day) were mad about higher taxes and their loss of control: loss of ability to run rough-shod over the lower classes. The inland regions were mad because the British had disallowed scrib money and payment of kind in taxes so the back country had no cash to pay its taxes with-that and the fact that the flat tax of the day (the pole tax) hammered them while it only lightly touched the coastal plantations.
Everyone was mad at the British, but it is pretty obvious that even at our start, we were not one big happy camp united in goals and attitudes.
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