Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Humping The American Dream: Afterglow

   The middle class has been gradually dissolving as poverty rises in America. While the "new economy" depends on job innovation, blue collar jobs that were the backbone of the American economy for decades are disappearing. If our new jobs rely on coming up with ways to do more with less (technical innovation and efficiency) while the "everyman" jobs (manufacturing and production) move offshore, don't more Americans fall into poverty? It used to be respectable for an American worker to work a factory job, support their family, maybe even work their way up the ladder a rung or two before taking a modest retirement. A college education could get one in a little higher up that ladder and earn a person a solid career with security, a better lifestyle, and a nicer retirement. Today the bottom seems to have fallen out and turned into a canyon between the rich and the poor.

   There is a given that the economy must grow. This is a poor plan in my own personal opinion because, even in the most optimistic or prosperous of times it never seems to find an equitable balance of wealth, control, and power and it has always been unsustainable in the long term. Regardless, we have set up a system that requires the economy to continually grow.

   Since WWII we have refined this concept of industrialization so that (almost) every American can have a home and a good job to support a family. Post WWII America saw the rise of the middle-class, abundance, and affluence. Franklin Roosevelt understood Jefferson's ideal that the world belongs to the living and was willing to change the terms of government based on current realities and not the realities of 1788. Still, his second bill of rights was never adopted. After WWII, FDR's second bill of rights seemed unnecessary, but we set out on a course of unintended consequences.

   It seems to me that after the prosperity of the 1950's we lost something that had been part of the American zeitgeist until then. Perhaps it was a result of Roosevelt's willingness to try anything to drag us out of The Great Depression? Maybe we got really comfortable with the middle-class lifestyle of the '50's, maybe we were just really relieved to be done with the Second World War in only 31 years? Maybe the Second World War just moved us into a new era where the Second Amendment was no longer a viable insurance policy for the average family? Certainly television was already starting to turn us into consumer-zombies. Whatever it was, the second half of the 20th Century saw a change in the United States and new breed of American. Gradually we became entitled, complacent, and resentful of anyone who pointed it out.

   In the sixties, we wrote off those who had an idea that things should be different. In the seventies, we had a President who told us, "I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our Nation's problems, when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure honesty. And above all, I will act." We promptly voted him out of office. We elected new people who opened the gates to hump all that was left of the American Dream in the eighties. The nineties had it's ebbs and flows with both sides focused on the economy. It almost seems serendipitous that terrorists from the Middle East attacked the U.S. in 2001, setting the course for Military-Industrial growth, potential control of the hundred-year-old lifeblood of industry, and the final, senile thrusts of The American Gang-Dream.

   At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st Century, we have surrendered our rights to government, our government and wealth to the heads of Corporation, and our children to almost certain poverty. American Imperialism has run it's course. Health (#37 according to the World Health Organization), education (18th among the 36 industrialized nations), infant mortality (the CIA cites 51 countries with lower infant mortality rates) -- the United States has fallen behind on all counts. Even if the U.S. is still the wealthiest country, it is only a very small handful of Americans who hold that wealth in 2011.

   We have only two real options at this point:

   1. Rise up against the Corporatist State of America

   2. Prepare for The Transition

   Brace yourself, citizen.

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