Fw: "Change is Coming"
Change is Coming
Change is coming: catastrophic changes that have been in the works for decades are about to take their place at the core of society.
What does that mean for us? It simply means that we cannot have it all. For longer than most of us can remember this society has treated all the things we do as just currents in the vast and subtle waves of change that have always been a part of every generation. Like most things there are elements of truth in that, and elements of self-deception.
In the dustbins of history we can see how most of what each society tried to do, was in one way or another connected to the growth and change required, as each society grew and moved in new directions toward a better life. Many could not often see the literal connections that gave these alterations their license to exist; yet for the most part, the validations were there. With the new millennium, the USA began to disregard this centuries old way of vetting the things that we chose to add to what we do, and how we choose to live our individual dreams. In these last, four long years, we have seen what it looks like to suspend our beliefs, to deny the facts beneath our nation’s choices, and most of all the new way we’ve chosen to ignore the obvious, in so many aspects of our lives.
In the arts the direct connection between people and the arts has been diverted. Music and song were part of how lives were lived, just as literature and stories once had more to do with the bits and pieces of our lives, than they did with the flash and fancy of other people's dreams: These changes were largely enacted by people living in privately cocooned lives of too much money. This has created an imbalance in the thrust and direction of creative expression, as benefactors have become more uniform, and far less reality based, in what remains of those fields. This is not to say that all is gone, just that these trends do not favor the point or purpose of the arts in the overall health of real life.
The arts spring from the need for personal expression and from the connections between people and ideas, between people and their world-view. But that ended when the arts became the plaything of the wealthy, and was converted into merely another abstraction without meaning for most of those who looked to them for connections.
The public has lost the thread of what once kept societies together, which was the well being and the connectedness of the general public. For this, the “me first” generation must take most of the credit. Along the way “politics” was left to the least among us, not the best. This has resulted in massive crimes that go unpunished, corruption unbounded by ethics or law—and in the pathetic non-choices now facing the public this November, in far too many races.
As life in the technological age has continued to move ever-faster, people now seem to be gravitating more and more toward becoming mere extensions of that high-technology, that both symbolizes and destroys the basic human values between and among people. True, we can do many things much faster, some say this is far more efficient, others that we are losing the whole point of living: But since life doesn’t come with an “owner’s manual” there is no right or wrong way to live any particular existence, so we have delayed grappling with the kinds of changes that are occurring at an alarming rate. Just as we have left behind human operators in favor of electronic “menus,” in everything from business to government – we are losing the ability to talk to each other, never mind the ability to think about what we do, or why we stay on any particular path.
This has also led to our failure to question almost anything that we might choose to do with our lives. Given our personal ambivalence toward almost anything we encounter, we have become nothing but footnotes in the lives of those who have designs on what we do, on how much we are paid, and whether or not we shall have a future. It is then, no wonder that our politicians and petty tyrants have taken most of the things from us that we once so highly prized—beginning with our individuality. Yet no one can take anything from another if that person firmly and clearly resists the theft. We have not resisted—so we have lost almost every important aspect, at the core of what is needed, to make our lives worthwhile.
Billions if not trillions of words have been written over these most recent four years, in an effort to discover the culprits beneath the fraud, the failures, the misdirection’s, and the schemes that keep unfolding daily. This is not a black and white affair, and it cannot be summed up in bumper-sticker slogans that seek simple or ready answers. We must look deeper.
It is probably too late, but what’s important is that we have failed to understand that the patterns of our lives were entwined with much older and time-tested ways that were valid because they worked. People need to be able to associate themselves with others, in open and uncensored dialogue. People also need to consider the ways in which they treat other people, as an everyday part of their own lives, and it appears that we’ve lost these two extremely critical abilities; rather, we have chosen our own agenda’s over the viability of others in the world, whether here or overseas. This isn’t just some simple act of generosity, it’s a necessity for mutual living – and we have flaunted this as something that only “suckers’ do. We have Ronald Reagan, and ourselves to thank for that: because while Ronnie pushed it, nothing would have happened if we hadn’t collectively “bought” and implemented this idea.
This goes way back in time, and cannot be laid at the feet of either party, or any one president, it’s been an integral part of the way we began to view the world after WWII. Over all that time America has come to believe in “Manifest Destiny,” and that it is our right and our place, as the remaining Super-Power to rule the planet.
Any society that has no idea who they are as individuals, cannot hope to be the dominant anything in a multi-dimensional world. Internationally, in education, we are somewhere near tenth place. In medicine we claim to be the envy of the world, yet what is pointed to are the prohibitively expensive breakthroughs that only the world’s wealthiest can afford; while most of our citizens can barely manage the threadbare health system we have—a system that is nothing but extortion and one that provides not at all, for any real medical difficulties. In choices for the young, our colleges and universities have become mere tech schools, cranking out diplomas, for jobs that no longer exist in the USA. But with the draft that's coming all this will change as well, along with the national economy that will not be able to function with everyone between 18 and 34 in the military.
Employment is a disgrace. We have allowed the government to fail to count the unemployed in vast numbers, because once the benefits run out, those people are just dropped as though they got a job or simply tired of looking—as if one can chose to just stop working. This “accepted practice” is a horror all its own, because by buying into this lie, we accept the complete fallacy that the nation provides real jobs for its people.
At the end of the day, between the fantasies of the unqualified to lead, and the dreams of greed among many of these same outlaws, this nation has embarked upon a course that can never be sustained. We have stood by and watched while our career fields were destroyed, or sent off shore, we have listened to the lies and to the constant drumbeat of fear and attempted intimidation—without raising our voices. Now comes the piper of reality who must be paid, and that farce that we call our national-international balance sheet simply cannot be reconciled. We have wasted our theoretical surplus, and added unconscionable trillions to our national debt, while causing blood to flow around the world for lies and constructs that only the truly self-deluded could believe. We have done almost irreparable harm to our stature in the world, and most of all, nearly 50 % of our citizens say they don’t believe one word of the above.
This is not a debate, its life, and actions do have real and lasting consequences. Those who “lead” us now, are going down, whether in this election or sometime soon after, not because of popularity, but because nothing they have offered nor anything that they are proposing, can ever really work in a world where the people play a part in their own lives, everyday.
No nation that has reached for the brass ring of Empire has ever succeeded for any length of time, and the USA shall be no different. The world is simply too large, and the variables too great for that to ever really happen. So much has already been lost, shouldn’t we begin to try and stop bleeding? At the very least we must alter course!
kirwan
posted by carol wolman @ 11:37 AM
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