It does not matter from which vantage point observations are made. All across America, it is the same. So many people losing everything they have worked for all of their lives to obtain.
Homes well into foreclosure, record numbers of individuals and families on food stamps and aid for dependent children. Charitable organizations are experiencing demand like never before with funding and donations at all-time lows.
Like the eerie creaks from within a building, on the verge of collapse, so too, is our socio-economic structure showing the foreboding signs of certain doom A catastrophe that very well may make stern separations between the strong and the weak. A rigid division between the rich and the poor.
In a desperate attempt to secure Western civilization’s standards to coincide with the expectation of American citizens, the federal government pelts funds on the local level with conditions of demonstrative need, hoping to keep the wolves of discontent away from the gates of the oval office for just another day.
And in so doing, it would seem, to many a conservative and liberal alike, that a grand conspiracy is afoot. A master plan as it were to harvest what toil is left from the American masses by perpetuating a dependence upon the American Government, from Washington DC to the local level. A direct refusal to allow the natural cycles of free enterprise to reinvent our socio-economic way of life through death and rebirth from its own ashes.
All counties throughout the United States are being infused with general assistance and food stamp funds. Unemployment, just a year ago was on the verge of insolubility, and now has now been unnaturally extended several times. And local law enforcement agencies across the nation have had a steady infusion of cash – million and millions of dollars funneled to them, causing fake prosecutions, planted evidence and what appears to many to be the granting of prematurely derived federal powers to local officers through spontaneous deputations.
There is a dependency that has weakened and threatens to completely annihilate the American spirit.
Already, most Americans today consider the proverbial American dream, nothing more than a cruel hoax.
Meanwhile, the American people become addicted to the blame game for emotional relief and as a way to preserve what little self-respect they still have left.
Immigration – both legal and otherwise becomes an immediate prime target. The concepts which become immediately acceptable are mostly comprised of generalizations that encompass all immigrants and for the sake of providing venting comfort, the negative aspects are singled out, embellished to an extreme and redundantly chanted through sensationalistic media and wide spread word of mouth, so that the definition of immigration and only it’s negative assets become common and collective knowledge.
The same begins to hold true for those that look down upon others that have fallen further down through the socio-economic ranks to a status of intense poverty. Compassion and empathy no longer stands on its own as a naturally occurring social value.
More and more we see that to be maintained, these values must be propagated by churches, charity groups and local community leaders. As though these groups and leaders were like coaches, pushing an exhausted sports team to finish out a losing game and remain respectfully good sports to the other side, regardless of the point – spread mentality of each individual player.
Since even before the technological miracles spurned by the tumultuous and now all but forgotten necessities of invention of World War II, contemporary American society still has yet to ask where all their time is going now.
With a third of everyone’s lives spent sleeping and another third spent with brain wave flattening television viewing, the other third is spent amongst fast food, star bucks, drugs and alcohol and these days, if one is so fortunate, under-paid and overly taxed labor generally for a corporate interest as opposed to private small businesses.
In the mid 1970’s it was found that many children in the urban areas of California (Bay Area and Los Angeles) believed that agricultural products were manufactured, rather than grown and harvested. This misconception was prevalent in the most disparate areas of the metropolises and occurred despite information that available to them otherwise via the sixty to eighty hours per week of television viewing informing them otherwise (PBS).
Since the 1970’s the urban areas have grown immensely throughout California, encompassing both North and South and our children born of generations since, have had even less exposure to information programming credited to the advent of redundant VCR/DVD/Tivo recordings and violent video games that glorify brutally criminal violence.
Diets of the masses that were still in the 1970’s at least partially balanced to adhere somewhat with Governmental recommended daily nutritional allowances have now become saturated with trans- fats, sugars and corn syrup.
As a rule, American civics and the study of what is arguably America’s most important historical lessons, such as World War II and the Great Depression are hardly even mentioned throughout the course of a students primary American education today.
American education has become a bureaucracy that has created a “teach to the test” type of an education and as a result, drop out statistics and general populace illiteracy rates have soared to proportions never seen before in contemporary American history.
All that the American people ask of themselves, their community and their Government today, is nothing more than immediate gratification, verbal reassurances for token ideals that reflect mocked values and stimulus funds aimed at cruel and unusual immigration reform so they might be able to acquire the easiest to be had jobs – food service and hotel/motel labor.
And for the news and other media on the television radio and major internet sites, there is nothing more than one huge distraction. A preoccupation of events much larger than ourselves and our individual lives despite the paltry taxes we pay, we constantly insist that all our needs be provided for us.
Our survival skills are now only honed to build a retirement to bed at the end of a look for work day or work day.
The prophesies set forth by Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World have already come to pass, though society at large still consider these concepts to be no more than extraordinary literary fiction.
Both of these works written in a story-like fashion and at a time when the only acceptability of concepts such as these could be had was through the subtle delivery of fictional prose.
So easy then today, it’s just a story. And even easier now, as such reference to ideology such as this provides comfort from the American Governmental storm as we turn a blind eye to atrocities occurring in our very neighborhoods and business districts all around us, while a handful of greedy autocrats on every local level clamber for United States Federal Stimulus dollars.
Even now, as our neighbors are taken away from us in shackles, accused of the most heinous of crimes and immoral turpitudes, we dare not lift our gaze in any demonstration of support for the innocence granted by the United States constitution as an inalienable right, lest we ourselves might suffer a similar fate and spend the rest of our lives in a prison, never to breath free air again.
Our journey’s to imprisonment are being christened by rogue cops, corrupt district attorneys and an ever-increasingly corporate government overseer.
God help us all, for we certainly seem entirely incapable of making a single stand for our brothers and sisters falling victim to faceless greed.
Copyright 2010 Robert Stanford all rights reserved.
