Signs That Something is Terribly Wrong:
- We keep electing people to governmental positions who despise government, and want to drown it in a bathtub. To despise government is to despise our identity as a nation, and as a people. It is beyond even a cowboy attitude. It is to hate living where you can see smoke from your neighbor's chimney, because you do not want a neighbor. OK, educate your own kids, take out your own appendix and, in the evenings, after milking the goats, find a cure for cancer! If your neighbor, who is bigger, stronger, meaner, and smarter than you are, decides to use you for target practice, move to Alberta!
- We are still fighting the Civil War. The Civil War wasn't about grits and cracklings. It was about slavery and racism. When the Civil War ended, racism had to find a new face. It became racial suppression, racial scorn, and economic advantage. It became poll taxes, and separate bathrooms, and White-Only restaurants and privileges. Who, in heaven's name, is all this voter registration and gerrymandering all about? Blacks. Hispanics. Jews. Asians. During Nixon's administration, Southern Democrats decided that it was to their advantage to become Republicans, taking left-over segregation with them. The Dixiecrat Democrats, who had been "Democrats in Name Only", switched parties, using States' Rights as a code name for hanging on to segregation.
- Guess who came to dinner! Barack Obama. You know Barack Obama. The Kenyan who says he was born in Hawaii. The guy whose Hawaiian birth certificate says was born in Hawaii. The old-fashioned Black Baptist who is really a Muslim: he must be! The Community Organizer who was elected to the Presidency twice by some mysterious democratic means. The guy who thinks everybody ought to have health care. The guy with the bright wife and two marvelous kids. The Black guy in the White House, who goes to Hawaii, of all places, to vacation! What is this nation coming to?
- Has everybody forgotten that this is a White Christian Nation, under God, and that we are the Last, Great Hope of Mankind? Has everybody forgotten just how exceptional we are? American Exceptionalism: we are God's Chosen People. American soil is deeper, blacker and richer than dirt anywhere else. We are brighter, better looking, and harder working than mules. As Garrison Keillor reminds us: where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the kids are above average. Doesn't anybody own a mirror?
Signs that We Aren't in Kansas, Anymore:
- Detroit is going down the tubes. Whatever happened to the steel mills and auto manufacturers?
- Nobody knows where the Middle Class went. Did Barack Obama send it to Kenya? Did it go to China? Somebody arranged for all the money to rise to the top and the Middle Class to sink to the bottom. Never has so much of our wealth been concentrated around so few, and the difference between what the rich have and what the poor earn been so vast. Do you still think your kids will have a better life than where they began? What is your plan to pay for their college tuition?
- Who are all these brown- and black-skinned people? Where did they come from? Who opened the gates? What Communist, Socialist, Atheistic, politician decided to let people marry whomever they wanted to? What if our kids decide to marry whomever they damned-well please? What if some of our kids, themselves, have brown skins? As my Norwegian forebears often said, because they knew how: "Uff-da!".
What is Happening?
Let's start with a long and large picture. There have been three great human revolutions: (1) from hunting and gathering to agriculture, (2) from agriculture to the industrial age, and (3) from heavy industry to the information age.
Agriculture made it possible for people to settle in one place and have enough food to stay there: villages and towns. Harnessing steam and electrical power called for even higher concentrations of people in cities; cities like Birmingham and the Ruhr Valley and Detroit. Industrialization did not kill agriculture, because people still need food, but it made it possible for far fewer people to raise the food. It destroyed small agricultural towns, just as agriculture almost wiped out hunting/gathering communities.
And now, today, almost within a lifetime, we are seeing the old industrial cities folding up their smokestacks and boarding up their factories. At first, some of the industry went overseas, or across the borders to places where there were cheap agricultural workers to be found for factory work, but even there electronics found them. So what happened, and is happening, to industrial workers? It is what has happened to the industrial middle class. They are not really prepared to find places in an information society. They are unemployed. It is not the case that anyone can find work if they want it. A lot of the people who say that could not themselves find work in Silicon Valley. They don't have to. But their kids will have to. And that is just the beginning.
We still need agricultural workers because the people who moved to the industrial cities do not want, and are generally incapable of doing stoop labor. Agricultural workers came from Mexico and Guatemala. Bright young people came from Asia and Africa and everywhere because they recognized that their future was here. But the past is here, too: our agricultural and industrial pasts, and the people who made it possible find it difficult to find new places in the information society.
People are scared. They are afraid they will never find another decent job that will pay enough to live on. They are afraid they will lose their jobs. They are afraid their kids will have it worse than they did, or than they are presently having it. And scared people do irrational things. They want the past back, again. They want their factory back, or their little town back. They want a job. They want to be able to retire comfortably, as they once planned to do. They blame their problems on the new immigrants, or on the new religions (most of which are very old, indeed). They blame . . . politicians . . . Black people, Brown people, liberals, conservatives, women, Southerners, Yankees, the Damned Yankees, anybody who isn't a Baptist or a Catholic, young people, Communists and intellectuals. Anybody. Everybody.
They need health care, so they try to deny it to everybody else. They need a way to retire, so they blame the poor. They cannot afford college tuition, so they blame taxes. They are angry! And afraid. They pretend we aren't a nation, so they damn government. They elect ignoramuses to government office because nobody knows what to do, anyway, and if you are clueless, having an ignorant representative seems about right. Cut off food stamps for the poor! Cut off unemployment payments for the unemployed. Maybe start a war. Maybe start two wars. Maybe go to war with Iran and Syria, too. Maybe. . . .
Maybe do something stupid, irrational, self-destructive.
Until we take an honest look at what is going on, we will do what we are doing now: stupid, irrational, self-destructive things.
We are in the middle of a revolution to a new kind of society. Things fly apart. The center cannot hold. There is no point in shooting ourselves in the foot. It does not help.
Let's start with a long and large picture. There have been three great human revolutions: (1) from hunting and gathering to agriculture, (2) from agriculture to the industrial age, and (3) from heavy industry to the information age.
Agriculture made it possible for people to settle in one place and have enough food to stay there: villages and towns. Harnessing steam and electrical power called for even higher concentrations of people in cities; cities like Birmingham and the Ruhr Valley and Detroit. Industrialization did not kill agriculture, because people still need food, but it made it possible for far fewer people to raise the food. It destroyed small agricultural towns, just as agriculture almost wiped out hunting/gathering communities.
And now, today, almost within a lifetime, we are seeing the old industrial cities folding up their smokestacks and boarding up their factories. At first, some of the industry went overseas, or across the borders to places where there were cheap agricultural workers to be found for factory work, but even there electronics found them. So what happened, and is happening, to industrial workers? It is what has happened to the industrial middle class. They are not really prepared to find places in an information society. They are unemployed. It is not the case that anyone can find work if they want it. A lot of the people who say that could not themselves find work in Silicon Valley. They don't have to. But their kids will have to. And that is just the beginning.
We still need agricultural workers because the people who moved to the industrial cities do not want, and are generally incapable of doing stoop labor. Agricultural workers came from Mexico and Guatemala. Bright young people came from Asia and Africa and everywhere because they recognized that their future was here. But the past is here, too: our agricultural and industrial pasts, and the people who made it possible find it difficult to find new places in the information society.
People are scared. They are afraid they will never find another decent job that will pay enough to live on. They are afraid they will lose their jobs. They are afraid their kids will have it worse than they did, or than they are presently having it. And scared people do irrational things. They want the past back, again. They want their factory back, or their little town back. They want a job. They want to be able to retire comfortably, as they once planned to do. They blame their problems on the new immigrants, or on the new religions (most of which are very old, indeed). They blame . . . politicians . . . Black people, Brown people, liberals, conservatives, women, Southerners, Yankees, the Damned Yankees, anybody who isn't a Baptist or a Catholic, young people, Communists and intellectuals. Anybody. Everybody.
They need health care, so they try to deny it to everybody else. They need a way to retire, so they blame the poor. They cannot afford college tuition, so they blame taxes. They are angry! And afraid. They pretend we aren't a nation, so they damn government. They elect ignoramuses to government office because nobody knows what to do, anyway, and if you are clueless, having an ignorant representative seems about right. Cut off food stamps for the poor! Cut off unemployment payments for the unemployed. Maybe start a war. Maybe start two wars. Maybe go to war with Iran and Syria, too. Maybe. . . .
Maybe do something stupid, irrational, self-destructive.
Until we take an honest look at what is going on, we will do what we are doing now: stupid, irrational, self-destructive things.
We are in the middle of a revolution to a new kind of society. Things fly apart. The center cannot hold. There is no point in shooting ourselves in the foot. It does not help.
It is a time for us, for us as a society, for us in government, to
- Help to people whose jobs have become obsolete
- Make sure everyone has enough food, shelter and health care
- Fashion an educational system for the new jobs to be done
- Turn our resources from war to building a new society at home
- Appreciating what it is to be a whole human community, here
- Building, not an industrial middle class, but one for the new economy
- Designing an economy that benefits everyone, not just the best, the brightest, and the greediest
It is time to pour ourselves a drink, sit back, talk to each other, and to make this place work for the world we really live in today.
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