Have Our Lives Turned into a Real-Life Horror Movie?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/media/have-our-lives-turned-real-life-horror-movie



***SNIP

The Sharks, Aliens, and Snakes of Our World

This came to mind recently because I started wondering why, when we step out of those movie theaters, our American world doesn’t scare us more. Why doesn’t it make more of us want to jump out of our skins? These days, our screen lives seem an apocalyptic tinge to them, with all those zombie war movies and the like. I'm curious, though: Does what should be deeply disturbing, even apocalyptically terrifying, in the present moment strike many of us as the equivalent of so many movie-made terrors -- shivers and fears produced in a world so far beyond us that we can do nothing about them?

I’m not talking, of course, about the things that reach directly for your throat and, in their immediacy, scare the hell out of you -- not the sharks who took millions of homes in the foreclosure crisis or the aliens who ate so many jobs in recent years or even the snakes who snatched food stamps from needy Americans. It’s the overarching dystopian picture I’m wondering about. The question is: Are most Americans still in that movie house just waiting for the lights to come back on?

I mean, we’re living in a country that my parents would barely recognize. It has a frozen, riven, shutdown-driven Congress, professionally gerrymandered into incumbency, endlessly lobbied, and seemingly incapable of actually governing. It has a leader whose presidency appears to be imploding before our eyes and whose single accomplishment (according to most pundits), like the website that goes with it, has been unraveling as we watch. Its 1% elections, with their multi-billion dollar campaign seasons and staggering infusions of money from the upper reaches of wealth and corporate life, are less and less anybody’s definition of “democratic.”

And while Washington fiddles, inequality is on the rise, with so much money floating around in the 1% world that millions of dollars are left over to drive the prices of pieces of art into the stratosphere, even as poverty grows and the army of the poor multiplies. And don’t forget that the national infrastructure -- all those highways, bridges, sewer systems, and tunnels that were once the unspoken pride of the country -- is visibly fraying.

[chervilant]

1. This morning, I entered DU to see if

Fukushima updates might be posted. The things which cause the most concern are rarely covered by the M$M...

Last week, I began asking friends and strangers to tell me what they know about Fukushima, and the immense job of moving the spent fuel rods. The majority of those I've asked don't even know what happened at Fukushima Daiichi, now almost two years ago. They don't know that water contaminated with significant amounts of radioactivity has been leaking into the Pacific since the catastrophe in March 2011.

Sadder still -- they don't want to know.

[Art_from_Ark]

4. Fukushima update

They have removed the first 22 unused fuel rods from the Unit 4 fuel pool safely and are scheduled to continue the work tomorrow.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. This guy says he was born in 1944...

and doesn't seem to realize his parents were born in the 30's and have memories of a country not quite as idyllic as he paints.

A lot of us were born around then and our childhood memories were of the postwar boom and incredible progress on many fronts. To our parents, however, like my abandoned mother, the Depression and WWII defined their lives. Many of them buried the memories of the horrors into vague history, along with the Johnstown flood, T. Roosevelt's hated reforms after he read about the blue milk, the Civil War, stealing land from the natives, Spain and Mexico and the rest of our history which shows the postwar era an anomaly in a country created by the wealthy and run by and for the wealthy.

We're not in the worst of times, we're in a rut that is, unfortunately, quite normal.

The only difference now is that this time we have the capability of taking the world down with us only a little over half a century after we saved it. We have achieved greatness, but the other side of greatness is how we got there, as every other great nation has learned.

I hate articles like this that make a point of some imaginary golden past.

[fadedrose]

5. Hope

The imaginary golden past always held hope for the future. Most ideas for the future now seem to take more away than give to those who most need help. Equality is a pipe dream to most folks.

Hope is something most people would like to have, but knowledge trumps it every time.

[Bluenorthwest]

9. Equality was litterally against the law in the past the OP longs for, it was Jim Crow and raids on

gay gathering places, no jobs for women, much less reproductive choice. I think to see the past as more equal than the present one has to start out white, affluent and straight. To me it is a disgusting point of view that denies much reality in order to pretend the past was glorious and filled with hope rather than being filled with jail cells and closets and segregated schools.

[fadedrose]

10. But they had hope

That's why they marched, refused to stand on buses, bravely marched into segregated schools. Without that hope, nothing would have changed.

There's starting to be a feeling of hopelessness, and that's when progress stops.

[TreasonousBastard]

13. I'm roughly this guy's age and I remember...

"Atoms for Peace" and Ronald Reagan on GE Theater talking about GE taking us into the future. A lot of other stuff, too, telling us that WWII was the Fire from which the Phoenix would arise. Our parents remembered the war itself, and the horrors that led up to it.

Sputnik didn't depress us as much as it pissed us off that some dirty Soviets could beat us to space so we threw billions into science programs and beat them to the moon.

Yeah, Hope. We had it back then. We conquered Hitler and were on the way to stalling Stalin. We would conquer our own racial and poverty problems, too. I lived in a neighborhood with veterans and Holocaust survivors who shared a past and put the war far behind them as they charged into the future with us kids.

But, Atoms for Peace turned into Chernobyl and Fukushima while GE holds back research funds. Space? That would take money from the military, or raise taxes. People are poor again and the Klan rises with a black President.

So much for Hope.

[Blanks]

6. You make excellent points...

The stock market crashed in October '29. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December '41. The war ended in '45.

It doesn't take a mathematical genius to see that Roosevelt was in office for a really long time before things got going in the right direction. The powers that be wanted to enter the war in order to get the economy going.

Obama has been in office for 5 years - if people were better at math, they'd see that FDR didn't have everything fixed in 5 years. FDR had a conservative Supreme Court (hardening of the judicial arteries) that kept him from making progress. The United Stated government is like a big ship, and it doesn't turn on a dime.

Regardless of what people believe, it took a long time before the American economy got going after the stock market crash, and while I wasn't around for it - I know it wasn't pretty.

[hfojvt]

12. heck, he is old enough to BE my parent

and I am not young. So he cannot really write about "OUR" parents like he shares the same parents with people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

[Laelth]

3. Very interesting perspective. k&r n/t

-Laelth

[Tigress DEM]

7. Humans have survived by telling themselves stories scarier than their lives.

But in these stories is a hero or a moral compass - a way out or a vision of overcoming the obstacles.

Caveman paints his success before the hunt.

Greeks battle the Gods and Titans.

Grimms fairy tales

An exception to prove the rule is The Canterbury Tales during the Middle Ages when much of life was dark and only the rich had any rights at all. But even if it was almost slapstick compared to a lot of other fare, it still dwells on how to survive in a world of strictest choices, what kind of choices are right or righteous?

[Bluenorthwest]

8. So another straight white man aching for a past that discriminated against those unlike himself?

Gets old hearing about how much his parents would be bothered by today's world.

[hfojvt]

11. "It was the best of times,

it was the worst of times."

Not meant to be a riddle - Dickens was talking about hyperbole. As he concludes his opening paragraph "in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."


and this "a country my parents would barely recognize ... Congress, professionally gerrymandered into incumbency"

Really? Because if your parents were born in the 1940s or 1950s, then they might recognize the 80-90% re-election rates of the 1960s http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php

The title is ridiculous "are we living in a horror movie". The author might have at least lampooned him/herself by talking about how in this age nobody is able to write an essay that is NOT loaded with hyperbole.

Not only that, he/she gives Washington too much credit. "And while Washington fiddles, inequality is on the rise,"

Ah, if only they were just fiddling. No, they are actively HELPING inequality to rise by working in a bi-partisan manner to pass boith permanent tax cuts for the rich, and austerity for the rest.

Myself, I hope they remain "frozen" and unable to sign a "grand bargain".