“I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE WORLD’S COMING TO!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
August 9, 2011
These were words of my Beautiful Betty this a.m., after she heard on the radio of the conflagration and riots in the streets of London. These riots segued from peaceful demonstrations after the police killed a youth committing a crime.
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The criminal element is always on the periphery just as cancer is in all our bodies waiting to exploit an opportunity to literally eat us alive.
Criminals are cancer in the social realm. No criminals are more energetic then gangs of youths bent on destroying property, breaking into and looting stores, and in this case, setting on fire a furniture store and factory that rose like a torch into the sky, illuminating the night but not in a kind way.
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We are a global society now and there are no secrets anymore. London has more cameras with Orwellian eyes than Carter has liver pills. They no doubt will identify, and bring to justice the perpetrators of this criminality, but after the fact.
We are a global society after the fact, but not in our conscious predilections.
Romans once deflected reality with gladiator fights in the arena. Vaudeville followed by movie pictures did so during the Great Depression. Conspicuous consumption became therapy for an anxious age after WWII. Today, electronic wizardry has filled this toxic void, finding no one the wiser to deal with reality.
We have loss our soul in this systemic retreat.
We operate on automatic pilot, and those in advanced societies of the globe, such as the United States and Western Europe, exist in the dream world of a borrowed future. They rely on hope in the belief that an optimistic persona will turn everything wrong into everything right in the end.
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In this world of excess without consequences, behavior is lock stepped in the moment.
A few people have had the temerity to assume leadership roles in this malaise, along with a few others who have had the courage to man the regulating agencies that point to excesses and outline consequences, usually to no demonstrable effect.
We punish these people who attempt to lead, who attempt to do the people’s business, while demanding everything from them, having no interest in how they attempt to give us what we want. Wants have become needs with little concern in how they are to be paid for in the end.
We need what we want and want what we need, never satisfied no matter how much we are given because there is always someone with more, and we have no interest in how they got it, but we want it, too.
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Americans have been living in this dream world since World War Two. What is worse, we have sold the rest of the world on this dream, especially Western Europe. Now they are stuck in excess the same as we are, and the bill is past due.
Panic is in the air, but panic is the perfume of our times.
Panic now thrives in the electronic age of media experts. They comment on everything under the sun. The airwaves are filled with the noxious aroma of their sickening pontifications, which have the sweetness of a toxic breeze off the city dumps.
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We have come to expect our leaders to bail us out of our excesses, and for regulators to not remind us of them, while their roles are mainly symbolic and tutorial. We are reminded of this fact every day.
An expert on education claims 74 percent of our schools across the United States are failing, yet little changes.
For at least the last forty years, authors have been writing books reminding us we are living on borrowed time, and that we are waste makers and compulsive shoppers, but this has gone largely unheeded.
Ten percent of our American corporations have sponsored innovative cultures, and have prospered. Contrast this with the 90 percent that labor on, as if it is still 1945.
In 1945, our workforce was mainly unskilled labor. Today, it is essentially college-educated professionals. Despite this, workers continue to be managed, motivated, manipulated, and controlled as if nothing has changed.
Middle management has become atavistic and corpocracy anachronistic, but you wouldn't know this if you visited 10,000 American plants or workplaces.
We have known for the last forty years that people were living (on average) 10 or more years beyond retirement age of 65. Nothing has been done to address that change or the spiraling costs of social security and Medicare.
The workforce today is increasingly obliged to support retired workers with little prospects for them to have the same advantage in their golden years.
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We have been a fast-food nation for the last forty years. Books have been written about the Fat American Nation. Now, suddenly, we realize obesity creates health consequences. Health issues lead to more medical and hospital costs. Fat people look to the government to bail them out of their dilemma.
BB and I spent late July and early August in the Balkans, traveling along the Danube River, and visiting Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary. We never saw a single fat person, except on the boat. Most passengers were Americans.
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Panic is the perfume of our times, and it only sickens.
Yesterday, the Dow-Jones Industrials on Wall Street went dropped 650 points after Standard & Poor downgraded the United States’ credit status from AAA to AA+ over the weekend.
A cataclysmic panic on Wall Street points to the vulnerability of a debtor nation, even a debtor nation of the size of the Untied States. Pundits call this a "wake up" call, but I seriously doubt it. We don’t wake up until our bed is repossessed and our furniture is out on the lawn.
The blame game has followed as predictably as night follows day.
The collapse on Wall Street is blamed on the Tea Party caucus, and on Standard & Poor, pointing out the regulator’s spotty history. No finger is pointing at the American people. It is a “global correction,” etc.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate in economics, has an embarrassing column today in which he compares S&P's action to “chutzpah,” or shameless audacity.
If this were not enough, he uses the non sequitur of the young man who kills his parents, but pleads for the mercy of the court because he is now an orphan as an illustration of S&P's action. One wonders how he managed to win the Nobel Prize with such shoddy thinking.
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The enemy is not our leaders. It is not the president. It is not the Congress. And it certainly is not the S&P regulators for pointing out the obvious.
The enemy, my dear readers, is us. We have expected those elected and those appointed to do the people’s business without a modicum of cooperation, involvement, sacrifice or commitment. We vote and complain, and take comfort in this exercise, and little else.
We have found no reason or need to act responsibility or differently. We are like the child who is caught doing something wrong; who quickly deflects the blame by saying little Tommy did it, too, as if that makes the wrong behavior, right.
For sixty years, we have not nurtured grown up behavior, and now baby boomers have reached or are close to reaching retirement age. I anticipate you asking me where I see myself in this scenario. Quite frankly, I don’t have the time or energy to answer all your responses, so I apologize in advance.
My children can tell you that their father, born in the Great Depression, and who has had to make his own way with a public school education, and considerable will, has had no trouble saying, “No!”
I mention this because my children have never asked me for anything no matter how dire their circumstances, and have always pulled themselves out of their own misadventures, as their father had to pull himself out of his. This has made them stronger, and more adult than many of their contemporaries. It has been my gift to them.
Beware of anyone that gives you something for nothing, or forgives you your sins that only you can expiate.
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