You know how I know? Because I’m watching a HUGE LIVE AUDIENCE turn out in Florida to watch a live version of Wheel of Fortune.
Doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know about why our country is in such dire straits?
I recently had a very short conversation with a long ago ex-boyfriend who said, “I don’t know enough to talk politics with you.” I mean, we’re not kids anymore. When is he going to start paying attention?
I think apathy is killing America.
Now, in their defense, if people are meeting their bills, growing their little retirement account, and their kids aren’t in any serious trouble, life is good for them. A lot of people really don’t see past the end of the block in their neighborhood.
They don’t see that their choice of buying an SUV is partly to blame for thousands of innocents who have been killed recently in the middle east.
They don’t see that by ordering the farm-raised Salmon at their favorite chain restaurant that they are 1) contributing to the decline of wild fisheries, and 2) bringing unwanted biological and chemical toxins into their bodies.
They don’t see that buying from chain stores affects the economic health of their neighbors.
They don’t care. Because they can still have their summer vacation (where they spend more in a couple of weeks than some people make in a year), can still get minimal health care for their children, and minimal education.
It’s ironic. In another post, I argued that middle class morality is the only hope for America. But after talking to some of these people, I also think these are the people most responsible for the death of America, through their willful ignorance.
It’s hard to be one of the few awake ones. I don’t want to go back to sleep. I want to wake others up. I treasure having a place to come where people are awake, and paying attention. But it is that vast middle section that is neither for us nor against us, and in that sense, they are leaving it for the few of us to do battle with the most powerful people this planet has yet seen.
It’s not a fair fight.
We need reinforcements.
We need those who are not paying attention to help make America what it never was, and yet must be.
Reinforcements are coming. A slow but steady stream will rise to fill the empty lakes of caring. I must believe this, so I do.
And when I look around, I see eyes beginning to open, not because of my wishes and dreams, but because of their broken ones. There is a hard rain a-comin’.
I read it somewhere today online, in one of the many blogs I check into from day to day and week to week, in relation to the Pat Robertson wakeup on global heating(I wish I had the link handy.) It said something to the effect that environmentalism used to be the province of only the most high-minded and intelligent and then offered a list of those who are now being accepted into the movement. It went something like this:
right-wing nut jobs, ignoramuses, ….
I can’t finish the list, but it was sad, funny, and hopeful all at once. Like I feel right now.
What an eloquent comment. You need to write more, blueneck! Beautiful and quirky at the same time.
It’s all stolen. I’m just an artful plagiarism dodger.
Not to whore day-old postings, but:
Try yesterday’s science headlines in the News Bucket to find the list of folks now welcome to join the environmental movement.
The headline was something like “Homer Simpson, your planet needs you.”
Glad to be of service.
😉
LOL. Great comment there, KP!
“Wheel of Fortune” and the like, are our bread and circuses.
IMO, our country will have to crash, and crash hard to wake up. Given the hate we’re creating around the world, and the massive indebtedness to China and other countries, I’d say this crash is all queued up and ready to go. It’s sort of the way a drug addict has to hit bottom, to face their delusions.
How does it feel to live in the twilight of empire? Was this what it was like in Rome around 400 AD? (One of my all time favorite descriptions of that time is found in the opening pages of Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization).
But I would argue that the idea of America isn’t dead. It’s changed address a bit, and has gone underground here and there. It may take a few generations to resurface in this country – after the toxic wreckage of the current regime is fully purged. You and I are part of the early stages of this purging.
How does it feel??? It sucks!!! I’m always living the twilight of whatever I’m in, how bizarre is that? I worked at a variety of companies right after they had passed their hayday, when stock was on the decline instead of a fantastic rise, etc. So I guess it makes sense I’m living at the twilight of America too. It makes sense, but it still sucks, bigtime.
Mrs. K.P. often kids me that I’ve been waiting for the collapse of America since the Reagan Administration. Some day I’m gonna be right, then she’ll see, LOL.
If climate change happens faster – or more tempestuously – than predicted, oil becomes unavailable or unaffordable due to global politics, and the federal debt catches up with us, it could happen. Throw in a pandemic for good measure, and well, let’s just say I have all my 401(k) retirement money invested in overseas stocks. I hope I live long enough to collect…
As far as I’m concerned, when the entire U.S. government called for torture as an established policy, and the entire population had that information in their face for years and did nothing, we have proof that the American idea is already dead.
For decades I thought of myself as a patriotic, conservative Democrat, attaching an ideal meaning to the term “conservative” that is long dead. But it’s over. Torture. It’s over.
That was the last straw for me.
I’m pessimistic about the next few years, he said dryly.
(But I always tend to look on the dark side, after so many personal disasters. Is it possible that a majority of the American people are outraged against torture and haven’t been able to have their voices heard? Is it possible that under the spell of the U.S. propaganda media, the people are ready to return to goodness and truth? I really don’t think so. But I hope so!)
No – I think you were right the first time. A surprising number of people I talk to just don’t seem to see anything wrong with torture. Not friends, of course. But in casual in-store conversations, etc., there are those who see, and don’t feel. Have they always been that way?
“Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?” – one of the opening lines of the (fabulous and politically relevent) musical “Wicked”
to know if there was a point in the past 50 years when a live show of Wheel of Fortune would not have garnered a huge audience in Florida.
I’m not sure that this is even evidence of apathy; people generally can walk and chew gum at the same time. But, I take it that you mean the Wheel of Fortune audience to be a metanym for a larger, harder-to-point-at-but-still-obvious body of evidence that something is truly rotten in the state of Denmark, and no one seems to care. Or at least, not enough people seem to care.
Yes . . . maybe. But I think something else is going on, too. I think the “ruling-class” — the politicians, and the pundits who write about and dine with politicians, and the business class who dine with and purchase the politicians — the “ruling class” once needed the general population to “feel” engaged in a “democratic process” so that the general population would continue showing up to work. If they think they citizens of the country, they will act like it, and work in the factories.
But, increasingly, the general population is irrelevent to the economic fortunes of the ruling class. The factory workers are overseas, the white-collar bottom-rung workers are moving overseas, the raw materials are overseas. So, more and more, what the American people think and do has less and less to do with how the ruling class lives.
Now, as a direct correlary to this, the electrons pumped out of the studios of the ruling class have less and less to do with the real lives of the economically irrelevent population. The talking heads can talk as though torture is no big deal because there is no workforce left to rise up against them in protest. There is less risk in stating the absurd because there is less risk that the economy will grind to a halt. The economy ain’t here, anymore.
So imagine the major media, the TV shows and the pundits, George Will and Tim Russert, as spinning off into space, increasingly disconnected from anything like the observable life of America. America is soooo 20th Century.
Why aren’t more people pissed off? About what? The government? The U.S. government has about as much connection to the average citizen of the United States as it does to the average citizen of Abu Daubi. Less, probably. What I mean is, apathy is not new. What’s new is that the average citizen will — perhaps correctly — insist upon their right to apathy. Demand it. Apathy is now a virtue. A defensive posture. The dance band on the Titanic. Wheel of Fortune , you say. Just another word for nothin’ left to lose, they say.
Do I believe any of that? No. I was trying to get a sense of what you were getting at.
You scared the heck out of me! It’s just – you had to see the picture – I mean there had to be several thousand people in the Wheel of Fortune audience. I mean, we’re not talking Jeopardy! We’re talking mindless, mind-numbing entertainment. It was like I said in another post – we’re all living in Jonestown now. I do think you’re right to the degree that people defend their apathy as a virtue. I’ve come across that. Why bother, they say. What difference can one person make? On that front, they’ve indeed won already. They’ve made people feel powerless. And to a degree they are less powerful, as less is manufactured here. But books are balanced here. Stocks are traded here. People still have all their power, intact. It’s just been so long since they’ve felt the urge to use it….
I think I said it better over here.
was inevitable after the “Curio Class” was taxed out of existence.
The same can be said of America today as the “middle class” (Curio Class) ceases to exist by taxation, importing jobs oversea’s, increasing consumer debt and the rising prices of goods and services.
Never thought I’d witness the beginning of a high tech dark age in my lifetime.
No, Lisa.
In the ’50s, my father’s essentially good-hearted American parents sat slack-jawed in front of the TV set watching Lawrence Welk and pro wrestling. They thought that Jews, Italians, Blacks, Asians and anydamnedbody else who was not just like them were inferior beings. That was the way it was in Norman Rockwell’s America. I am a surviving eyewitness to this.
I was there.
Waking up.
Being born.
So were you, at whatever time you came up.
So were ALL of us.
America is NOT dying.
It is in the process of being reborn.
Those thousands at the live Wheel of Fortune show? And the other millions like them?
They are being left behind.
They are the afterbirth.
I firmly believe this. Please read my month-old diary Meet-up in the Working-class Boonies for further evidence.
Yes, there are millions who are still driving their murderous SUVS, eating bad food at bad restaurants and chain-storing their asses off. But they are in decline. People are awakening because they must, if for no other reason. (As is there was EVER another reason for awakening.)
Their SUVS are getting too expensive to operate.
Their bad food is literally killing them off. As is their bad medicine. At best, it is making them uncompetitive. Those millions of Mexicans who marched last month? They were marching on freshly cooked chilé rellenos and good rice and beans. Where was the middle class? Inside. Because their fast food-fed asses were too weak and too stupid to march.
Their chain stores are providing inferior goods and services. They are NOT cheaper. Their products break. And poison people. Their hiring practices and bottom-line buying drive societies into economic decline.
Why am I not like my grandparents?
Evolution.
Which continues, driven as it has always been driven by one concept and one concept only.
Survival of the fittest.
NOT survival of the fattest, or dinosaurs would still rule the earth.
Will America experience a regression, will it no longer be Boss of the World?
Yes.
‘Bout time.
It is dying?
No.
Just going through an adjustment.
It is STILL the most noble attempt at multicultural and multiracial co-existence that has ever happened in the history of the world.
I watched Clint Eastwood’s truly wonderful paean to blues pianists last night on PBS.
Fats Domino woke me up in 1958 or thereabouts. Among a number of OTHER “others.”
Johnny Cash.
Little Richard.
Dinah Washington.
And eventually a whole lot of OTHER other others.
Here come ANOTHER mother. Always and forever in America. (Barring the unforeseen nuclear-driven collapse. Praise God and pass the jalapenos. Which I ate in some sushi yesterday. ONLY in America. Good, too. Yellowtail, scallions and jalapenos. Only in America.)
I am telling you once again, the blues will save America.
ALL them blues.
Mexican blues.
Black blues.
Caribbean blues.
Country blues.
Rap blues.
ALL them blues.
And Wheel of Fortune will join all the other quaint cultural memories like The Lawrence Welk Show on the memory shelf of history.
Think UP, Lisa.
Evolution progresses, as it must.
Think UP.
We gonna be alright again.
Any day now.
Aaaaaany day…
Think UP, Lisa.
We ain’t finished yet.
Not nearly.
Later…
AG
No. America is NOT dying.
AG
I love this, AG.
Thank you.
Me too.
Not the writing.
Just the facts.
Evolution is a fact of life.
THE fact of life, really,
The LIFE of Life.
May it continue. In all of us.
AG
It’s hard to be one of the few awake ones.
Boy, aint THAT the truth!
I think it’s a matter of perception. You had the misfortune of witnessing a spectacle that you responded to emotionally. We all know how you feel, will gather round like a herd of elephants and caress you with our trunks in sympathy. But what can lift our spirits better than a piece of music from Arthur Gilroy. Together we will get through this difficult time. Trumpeting around the globe.
I have long been an animal rights activist, and see it all from that perspective. I think I’m right in not eating meat, but I know few people agree with me – certainly my cats and dogs do not. It’s not worth spending my energy to try to convert the whole world to my point of view. If I do, then I’m a religious evangelist, or a shi’ite. Easier to enjoy the comfort of my herd.
This is all evolution in action. It’s quite beautiful, no? Interesting times…
Thanks, Alice, and all who offer comfort. I love the image of the elephants circling, offering their trunks in support. It strikes me that no animal has ever built anything that polluted the planet. Whales sing, and cats paint, but we claim soulfulness for our race only.
I appreciate AG’s song as well. I wish I could share the hope. I do know lots of great people who are trying to move things forward. We all know they’re not the majority. I guess the question is, are they a large or powerful enough minority to make a difference?
I fear the coming of war with Iran. I really feel we’re losing our soul in America. On my blog, after this, I wrote a post “Living in a Dali painting.” The world feels so surreal right now, I just thought that was an appropriate way to describe what I see.
We can enjoy mindless entertainments like “Wheel of Fortune” (hell, when I was living with my in-laws, that was one of our favorite things to watch together), or a greasy fast-food burger…the point is not to make them our whole lives.
Mr. and Mrs. Average American, if they read this diary, would start talking about “those damn liberal elites, thinking they’re so much better than the rest of us.” I don’t know if we can afford that kind of thinking — not when we’re trying to rebuild this country. Instead of looking at things like this and say, “America’s dying”, let’s try and get to people where they are, find the small signs of hope. Sure, they’re showing up for “Wheel of Fortune”, but maybe they’re looking at trading in their SUV for a hybrid. Maybe they’re still eating too much fast food, but they’re putting their plastic Coke bottles into the recycling container instead of the trash. Maybe they’re shopping at chain stores like Wal-Mart, but they’re tossing in a few extra jars of peanut butter and cans of chili for their local food closet or a couple of packs of underwear for the homeless shelter.
We can’t expect Mr. and Mrs. Average American to be running progressive marathons right away…they’re going to need to take baby steps. But put together enough baby steps, and eventually you climb a mountain…
I hear what you’re saying, and I know you’re right. It’s just frustrating to see someone I knew and loved, so very long ago, on a path to nowhere. He’s not taking baby steps. He’s not taking ANY steps. He’s taking steps so he doesn’t have to deal with what’s going on. That is frightening to me, because he’s a good man with a good heart. How many others like him are out there?
As Martin Luther King used to say, all it takes for the triumph of evil is for good people (he said men, I’ll say people) to do nothing.
I know the feeling well Lisa.
But the title of your diary made me think of something. Especially since the immigration issue became big a few months ago, I have been trying to recognize that “America” is much bigger than the US.
So, I would say that the US in fact, may be dying. But America – thats another thing. There are those who live to the south of us in America that are very much awake.
It actually gives me hope when I look beyond our borders and see people taking the power they have and doing something with it. And we do have lots of examples of that happening. Perhaps its time to find ways to join with them.
I love that image. You’re right. The point about our wrong definition of “America” was brought home to me in the remarkable, lovely film, “The Motorcycle Diaries”, about Che Guevara and the path that led him ultimately to communism.
Indeed. Central and South America may well prove to be the hope of the world, in the coming century. Time will tell.
An inspiring leader can make a big difference, to wit:
JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
GWB: “We have been attacked, go shopping.”
The American public is waiting to be asked to step up to the plate and help solve society’s problems. This can be seen in the outpouring of help that arrives whenever there is a calamity (child down a well, or the like). But, the lack of leadership means that there is no organizational oversight; this can be seen in the disorganization after Katrina.
With politicians of all stripes being timid and unwilling to take a stand on anything the new leader will have to come from the people. For example I recently proposed an income tax war surcharge on the top three brackets. This would stay in affect as long as military expenses exceeded a certain threshold. A few comments on the diary understood and supported the idea. Has there been any such proposal from any politician?
People want to have meaning in their lives. Sacrificing for a better future is one of the most powerful. The lack of such political leadership has been filled by religion and hate groups.
Arcturus shared this:
STOP BECHTEL! Call to Action: August 6-9, 2006
I’ve read all the comments (though quickly), and several others on different diaries here this morning: we are putting out fires.
Step back a moment. What we need to do to stop the dying, that Lisa and others see. Take some time to think about what makes people into persons who see the risk of death of what’s valuable in the world — versus what makes people who do not see.
Oops, I just realized I was about to write something far, far too long here. I might make it into a diary, if I have time.
And that’s really my point: We have to do some prevention here – tearing ourselves away from the crisis of the moment, and preparing those future fighters against entropy and delamination (younger ones, e.g. kids and not-yet-engaged-but-not-hypnotized adults). If we don’t do that, then, well, this country and this world will die as we do.
I hope you write that diary, Kidspeak. I want to hear the rest of this train of thought.
Americans are lazy and willfully distracted. Getting their attention is the problem. If they were appropriately informed, I’m sure that things would be different.
if things go bad they will start looking for other leaders. we might very well be those leaders. it is just that are followers are in a different camp. without much thought they can come over to our camp. has always been like that.