|
Okay folks, I've had it. I've been exiled to East Texas, and the rednecks are getting to me. The election year brouhaha is getting to me. And I'm just having a bad day all around. I don't know what finally set this rant off, but here it is.
All the "values" issues are political hot buttons with no real significance. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with anthropology knows that the dissolution of the family is a function of industrial society. To put it plainly, we have entered a technological phase of civilization where environmental change is outpacing social evolution. Each major advance in technology has placed extreme stress on a significant portion of the populace, causing the affected family structures to weaken or collapse. Those collapsed families sent ripples through the society which weakened more family structures. Lots of things are to blame for current "family values" problems in our society, some of which aren't directly related to industrialization. Slavery actively destroyed the family structure of blacks in this country for two centuries. Racism has worked to reinforce that instability in the century and a half since slavery was abandoned. Questioning the moral values of an individual based on complexion is both stupid and counterproductive. And anyone who thinks that family instability in black households doesn't impact their own family stability is a fool. When Henry Ford made the Model T available to everyone, he dealt a deadly blow to the family structure of this country. Real extended families are almost unheard of now. A nuclear family without the support structure of an extended family is at extreme risk. Working moms aren't the problem. The lack of aunts, uncles, grandmas and grandpas in the house when the kids get home is the problem. Grandiose stump speeches about fixing the family are 100% pure crap. The family structure in this society won't heal until our social order adapts to the dislocations enabled by unlimited transportation, until it adapts to the external "peer pressure" of the broadcast media, and until it adapts to any number of other stressors that bring instability into the lives of individuals. How we legislate spirituality, sexuality, and morality will not strengthen families. It could be argued that social legislation of any sort simply introduces additional stressors which hinder the natural adjustment of the society to the profound changes brought on by rapidly advancing technology.
The War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism are crap. The drug trade is a ten billion a year business in this country. Stop the drug trade and the economy would tank overnight. The crack cocaine crisis was a direct result of the Iran-Contra deals of the eighties, which were financed by a massive flood of cocaine into southern California. In a very real sense, Bush I was the father of crack cocaine. If you take what are certainly unrealistically conservative estimates of marijuana use in this country and calculate the bulk of that much weed entering the US on a daily basis, it is obvious that drug busts on the border are to discourage unauthorized smuggling, not to inhibit the flow of drugs into the US. The DEA is the Drug Enablement Agency, not the Drug Enforcement Agency. Researchers have shown conclusively that DEA and HUD policies work to funnel federal housing funds into the hands of campaign contributors by flooding drugs into neighborhoods, thus impacting real estate values. Nobody cares. Drug offenders fill commercial prisons to work in phone banks and document processing houses. Nobody cares. Entire segments of the population are forced into grinding poverty by government policy, and nobody cares. The state-level politicians who get fat from drug laws have a new cash cow. Anti-terrorism. The federal government hasn't gotten into the terror prevention business big time yet, but it takes a while for the political supporters to position themselves to reap the bounty. For now, the states are forking over the billions needed to create the cash flow infrastructure. Assuming the economy holds together long enough for real profits to develop, you can bet that major federal bucks are forthcoming. For now, overseas contracts are providing an excellent conduit to funnel public moneys into private coffers. Anti-missile countermeasures on commercial jets? You gotta be shittin' me. I used to build anti-missile countermeasures systems. I know what a joke that is. It rates right up there with star wars defense systems as far as being technologically ridiculous. It's about the same thing as fingerprinting foreign visitors. It's great for impressing the ignorant, but has no effect on deterring anyone who wants to perpetrate mischief.
And what about environmental issues? Do me a favor. Get a globe. You know, one of those planet Earth looking things on a stand. They should have one at the public library, if you know where that is. The Earth rotates at roughly a thousand miles an hour at the equator. That makes the Earth roughly 24,000 miles in circumference, 7,600 miles in diameter, or 3,800 miles in radius. I don't know the exact figures, too lazy to look it up, and it doesn't matter. The atmosphere is effectively five miles deep. It's really a lot deeper than that, but at that altitude, your blood boils, so that's good enough for this example. So the globe you rounded up represents a sphere with a radius of 3,800 miles. Imagine the five miles of atmosphere adhering to the surface of the globe. The atmosphere is 0.00131 times the thickness of the globe. That's like a damned thin coat of oil on the surface of that thing in your hand. And the kicker is, you are totally dependent on that oil slick for your existence. You breathe it. Your food grows in it. Your weather is a function of that sheen of oil. And the viable soil that is just as vital to your existence is so tenuous I can't come up with a way to represent it in this example. All that blue stuff? Those are damp spots a whole lot thinner than the oily mess you now have to clean off. The ecosphere isn't some kind of plentiful resource. It is a tiny, precious, and blemished resource that is at a critical and growing risk. The idea that environmental protection should should be balanced with economic needs is completely insane. Without a healthy environment, there is no economy, or anything else, for that matter. And the real kicker is that the environment isn't just air or soil or water. It's a closed system so complex we can't even begin to understand how it works. Personally, I'd much rather err to the side of caution, since a mistake has, one could say, significant consequences.
The budget deficit is crap. The war in Iraq is crap. Almost every issue being bandied about in campaign speeches, radio talk shows, and front page headlines is crap. None of it makes a damned bit of difference. All of these things are symptoms of a problem. Fixing them, assuming they could be fixed, would accomplish nothing. Break out the history books, and you'll find that the current administration is a reincarnation of the Nixon administration of the sixties and seventies. These people are a well organized group of sociopaths who are actively working to turn the world into a single vast feudal state with corporate masters rather than hereditary masters, although the funding for this effort has a financial lineage back to the hereditary lords of Europe. The Eugenicists of the early twentieth century manifested in the Nixon cabal, and modern neocon PNAC psychopaths are the direct decedents of the Nixonites. Nixon managed one action that nobody really cared about, then or since. He freed the US currency from the gold standard, and cut a deal with the Saudi's to trade all OPEC oil in US Dollars. The result of that is that during the time of Reagan / Bush (let's be honest here, it was really just twelve years of Bush) the US economy was finally converted to a giant pyramid scheme. And like all good pyramid schemes, the ones at the top reap the rewards. TV addicted, SUV driving wage slaves cheerfully labor to pump society's wealth up to the top. And as long as global oil consumption continues to rise, the pump just keeps chugging along. Think about it. Ninety five percent of this nations wealth is in the hands of one percent of the population. I don't care how fat your 401k is after the recent market runup, it ain't shit compared to Bill Gates' weekend pocket money. Wealth is relative, and if you don't believe it, you're fooling yourself. All those smug Enron employees proved how valuable stock certificates lying in your retirement account really are. And everything will be just hunky-dory, no matter what the deficit is, no matter how many kids Bush II blows up, no matter what, until global oil consumption starts contracting (any day now) and the pyramid collapses in on itself. At that point, the SUV's will be lawn ornaments, Wal-Mart will be a dry place for the starving squatters, and the privileged will be living high on what oil is left while the general population starves to death, leaving lots of breathing room for The Enlightened Ones. Face it, living off the dying remains of our economic and technological base could be pretty sweet for centuries to come, as long as you have the arms and power to protect your hoard during the dissolution.
As long as this society believes that rushing around dropping the kids off at soccer practice or dancing lessons is more important than turning off the goddamned TV and spending a little time with the kids, as long as this society believes that showing up at the polls now and then instead of actively engaging in local, state, and national politics is good enough, as long as we sit and bitch instead of learning what the real problems are and actively working to solve them, we're just screwed.
Stupid people are a liability for any society. But it is the ignorant who are the real peril.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
