It ends with poverty -- that is the price of stupidity, greed and sloth -- in other words an economy driven by primarily by consumption. It is the price of being a poorly educated society in a global economy -- a society where half of the urban school children do not even graduate from high school.
There are still people in America who are amply capable of earning a very handsome living in a global economy -- your local construction worker won't be so lucky. Those who are very well educated and well employed will experience a growing standard of consumption -- but they will live in a society that frightens them with crime and poverty. They will wall themselves off from the fearful reality of a society in morbid decay. They will complain about taxes without knowing that taxes help them more than any other class of people to keep the world around them from collapsing into an unlivable see of rot, violence and crime. They will refuse to fund globally comeptitive science and technology and world class schools (hell, even minimally finctional schools), and then they will wonder why the people around them are so incapable of making a lving and surviving in a global economy.
And in time the global economy will come under fire -- as if the educated person in China or India is repsonsible for the poverty and crime and decay of America -- as if shutting our borders will somehow trasnform us into a vibrant, advanced industrial economy. People will come to fear the world, as so many ignorant people already do. Political parties will compete to frighten people about 'foreigners' who are robbing them of their birthright -- much as happened in Germany, once upon a time. Fear, crime, poverty -- they will all be reflected in the dollar -- the rotting currency of America.
The shame of it is that we brought this on ourselves. Those who understand the process of rot did not bother to speak up and head off this sad state of affairs. We withdrew -- muttering under our breath and leaving the floor to loud mouthed fear-mongering morons -- we let them puke out their anti-tax, kill-the-foreingers, creationist, fear of science, fear of education, and fear of the world crusades -- waged from their backwards gas guzzling enclaves. Now we are lost -- as if we can conintue as we are when we know it is futile to even try to do so. But we are so fearful of embracing anything new -- so afraid that we are being fooled. You see it everywhere -- signs hanging from trees that proclaim "global warming is a hoax". And we listen to them. We think maybe the rest of the world is wrong -- maybe we can just prtend a little bit longer and the future will never arrive. but the future is here -- we are living it. And the future is unforgiving. The future says we are a bunch of whining losers who were once rich and blew it. We blew it because we let the loudest idiots in our country run the place. And when we elected thoughtful people, they too proved to be so afraid of the idiots that they invited the idiots to stay and help run the country. Now we are increasingly putting our faith in the idiots rolling the dice once more on ouor behalf -- we don't need change, say the idiots. We need stability they tell us. We don't want to change very much -- that would be disruptive. And so on down the toilet we swirl -- quietly watching the toilet bowl grwoing raound us, the voices of the idiots still ringing in our ears -- too bad we did not speak up about all of the this and demand real change. |
