I live in a nation where “pizza is a vegetable” (well, technically, the two teaspoons of tomato paste that usually adorn them, but still, it’s a cheap way to save on serving actual vegetables to children who need them). I live in a country that classifies “Saved By The Bell” as “Educational and Informative” on morning children’s programming. If ever there was a time to be concerned about the future of my homeland, we are long past it. The disease of crony capitalism, crass commercialism, and corporate domination has reduced the citizenry of the United States to mindless consumers.
The more I read about where we’re going, as a nation, and as a people, the more I realize we need drastic change. We need a complete overhaul of everything. People’s hearts need to change, their minds need to accept new ideas. We need to make human beings the number one priority, rather than as commodities to buy and sell. We’ve already sold our souls, our minds are beholden to corporate interests, and our hearts are the last battleground. I believe we need libertarian socialism, a social form of anarchy, but that is a dramatic shift that would require nothing short of a major change in how we live for us to accept it. In short, it might happen once our world decides to shake the biting fleas from its back, but until then such ideas will be resisted.
Republicans generally believe the market is God, and that it will solve every problem they care to address, leaving others by the wayside. Unfortunately, many Democrats also believe the market is God, and will solve every problem that they can address. I don’t think “throw more money at it” is going to solve things. We have to completely change what we understand about humanity, about working together, about a society that could build a world equal to all from the ground up, and geared towards human advancement in harmony with the environment. The way we’re living right now is unsustainable. We can’t keep this up much longer, and the longer we take to do something about it, the more likely it is we’ll never make it happen in time, and the U.S. will collapse from the inside out.
I do not wish for that to happen.