Ideas Are Good…

Posts Tagged ‘king’

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” – Martin Muther King, Jr.

If cash in the pocket or our people is any indication of prosperity, our country is in a pretty sorry state. While good, common people burn through savings, lose investments and face foreclosure, our Government continues to focus the extent of its attention on Wall Street. While bankers fund our ruin by way of the Federal Reserve to the tune of Billions of dollars in profit, social security and medicare wither away like dusty promissory notes in an empty vault. Young people are coming out of higher education with no place “higher” to go unless it is with the Government or its contractors. If fact, if it is not government funded and run , its a risky endeavor. Government just can not get Americans to act right towards the corporations that they keep helping so Government gets bigger and the dollar gets weaker. Wall Street has become the measure of the economy.

America was NEVER Wall Street. It used to be Main Street, filled with people that had belief. The belief that they could do anything, have anything and accomplish anything. America was once a place run not by entertainers and personalities, but a place of workers and problem solvers of necessity. Many great men stood in the way of greed and the human tendency to be fat and happy over our history. Mostly dead and their words forgotten, like Kennedy and King. Gradually, our leaders forgot that it was America’s people that was her greatest asset, not Cadillacs. They forgot that families made a country great, not financing. The American people were exploited to buy things and we did. We went from human beings in the minds of our leaders with a Bill of Rights to being merely consumers represented on a projection grid somewhere on Madison Avenue. When we could no longer buy another thing or pay the interest that climbed higher than the original loan, our Government’s allegiance crept from serving the people to serving the products.

There used to be Mom and Pop dreams standing on Main Street but not anymore. There isn’t even a Main Street anymore. There is a Wal-mart or two in every town. There used to be family run drugstores and service stations. Gone. There are Walgreens on every corner because we are all on drugs we can’t afford. There are energy company run conglomerates where we can get gas but no service. Look around or better yet, look back twenty years. You do not even see flags on houses anymore unless things blow up somewhere. No flags but wi-fi in every house and 500 HD channels. Today, we can not find a human answering a phone to assist with any of the things for which we have to pay. Why should they talk to people that have to pay? If you are going to make a purchase though, talking to someone and being treated well is almost guaranteed. Kindness is easy to find when we are paying, harder to find when we can not. For most of America an e-mail address is only a means to sell something to a faceless consumer.

But we did this. We let this become the norm. We had to go faster, be more efficient, mulit-task and automate so we could get more (fill in the blank). The American dream used to be something we did together but it became a contest of how high we could climb stepping on heads and breaking each others back. We played the game and the corporate sponsors cashed in on the show. All this is SO ironic considering communism, so long fought as an evil force on the earth, wins a long and silent war without firing a single shot. Hong Kong is boom town and Main Street is a freaking ghost town. I wonder if the dead veterans would like the idea of dying for our “chicken fried” and consumer slavery.

I always knew I would live to see the end of America. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, America often seemed like the fat, spoiled kid down the street. He was big enough to kick your ass and would if you crossed him but mostly he was content filling his face and looking at his Dad’s Playboys. The rules were easy on the block and at the bus stop, don’t mess with “his”. And if “his” was “yours”, so be it. If you were his “friend”, life was good even if he was a bully. Not only was he a bit of a thug, he was scared. Scared of everything. You could see it on his face. He was afraid people were not doing right, living right or agreeing with him. He would fight you just for thinking wrong. If history is any teacher at all, I knew that kind of control could not last for long. One day someone would beat his ass or he would be too stupid to change and just fade away. America, at least in my lifetime has been like that guy, fighting wars in he smallest, poorest places on the globe and scare to death. Fear like that has produced little over the past twenty years but eating disorders, new illnesses, lots of prescriptions and addictions to everything.

Somehow America never got big enough to exist without fear. This is the story of the end of our country. We are watching it happening right now nearly powerless in our fear that we may not be able to afford a latte one day. Perhaps we will live to see society evolve yet again. Maybe the cup of human want will be filled to the extent that humans will want for something else. Like the use of all that humanity has to offer, to serve all of humanity. A single brotherhood, without fear.