Most of us in the upscale retirement community where I live, congratulate ourselves on being isolated from the crime and mischief that occurs outside our boundaries. We are indeed fortunate to be able to pursue our golf, tennis, bridge, and mahjong activities without fear of being accosted by drug pushers on the street corner, or shot while riding our golf carts. Besides staying physically isolated we can also stay mentally secluded if we follow the advice of the well-known Doctor Andrew Weil, who recommends us to get healthy and stay healthy by not listening to or reading The News, in addition to following his diet recommendations and taking regular exercise. Altogether then, we can inhabit our starter castles and applaud an existence envied by 98 percent of the U.S. population, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Some among us — a relative handful in our 9,000 population — recognize their good fortune in being able to live here, and strive to give back to those in communities around us who fared less well in life’s game of chance. There are others, however, who consider they have earned their place in this small heaven-on-earth via a life of hard work and thrift, while believing that those outside the gates of our small heaven, who struggle for their daily bread, have gotten what they deserve.
A resident recently remarked that the rising cost of living was a good thing in that it would drive from our neighborhood those in a lower income bracket; presumably because he considered they lowered the tone of the community. It is sad to reflect on the multiple effects that have slowly but surely divided the rich and poor more clearly in recent decades, while destroying the middle class and robbing so many of a chance to attain the now mythical American Dream. The humanist and philosopher, Clive James, observed that America is now more divided by class than European countries, and is closer to a South American nation such as Brazil in accommodating extremely wealthy citizens together with abjectly poor ones. The effects driving this unhappy progression include a gigantic military-industrial complex, which drains resources in a self-fulfilling scenario of perceived global threats, the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, globalization of national economies, and the plain abdication of the ordinary person from resisting an autonomous system. Can anyone really believe that an electoral system that relies on prospective government officials collecting money from donors (mostly in the top 1% of the power-wealth segment of the nation), who effectively buy future influence, is a healthy one?
Elected politicians no longer control our national society: they just fit right into the establishment mold . For the 2016 presidential campaign, more than a billion dollars of influence peddling will again change hands, and the majority of the American people will have no qualms about the situation — to the sheer amazement of onlookers in other democratic nations. Real change and control is in the hands of the ordinary person if they really see what is, and has been, happening around them. From the recent election, one has to ask, “Are they blind? Don’t they care? Are they so easily swayed by glib phrases and slogans? Are they more interested in TV soaps than in their own futures?”
We have major problems looming. The collective internal debt incurred by successive U.S. governments for Medicare, Social Security and The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (the federal insurance program) now totals approximately $50 trillion. A lifetime of severely reduced economic prosperity faces our children and grandchildren. Which political party is going to have the guts to break the bad news to the public? While this situation is still hidden from the majority of citizens, there is a political party that would like to continue spending vast sums on wars we don’t need to get into, and we know we have tens of thousands of bridges and other key infrastructural services needing repairs running to hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition to our financial problems, we are facing a global warming disaster so bad that our government is paralyzed with fear in case the man in the street realizes how badly our planet is threatened, and wants immediate action to return things to normal, so he can go back to wondering how The Cubs will do next season or who will be the next star of American Idol.
Yes, it would be comforting to concentrate on our golf game and not listen to the gloom and doom of the news, but the really bad stuff is yet to come! We are still connected to the rest of the human race, undeserving as we might think them to be. There is a country and world around us that is crumbling. It needs us to rise up as a nation with our collective voices to bring sanity and decent instincts for justice to the way we govern ourselves and spend our collective capital.
Photo by Zerone Eric Ouano
Michael E. Sedgwick 