After years in Europe, Americans’ inability to live is so obvious that it constantly makes me sad to view the simulacrum that passes for life in the USA.
One pauses for nothing, and I will not be surprised to learn that toilet seats have replaced chairs at dinner tables so that one can multitask and see oneself the trouble of digesting one’s food.
In Europe one works to live and they live quite well with a much greater social concern for society as a whole. In the USA possessive individualism has gone mad and excessive wealth is a prime value for many and damned be thy unfortunate neighbour.
America has a group of top tier universities that are second to none, but a general educational or preparatory system that is second rate and growing worse yearly.
It has a health care system that is very expensive and serving mainly the wealthy and one sickness can destroy a family and the kicker, 50 million people, 1/6 of the population, are just not part of the system which has life expectancy, child mortality and other statistical figures that would shame European leadership.
Food quality, in terms of health and nutrition, can only bring tears to the eyes of the aware and the obesity figures speak directly to anyone conscious of the connection between obesity and health.
The soil is being destroyed.
Farms are now factories that don’t even feed farm families.

Behind this interconnected expanding disaster is the vale system of a country that has allowed large corporations and their total focus on profit to rule.
If death is profitable, then death is the rule. If food makes money, but is ruining the soil by the way that it is grown and literally killing the people who eat it, that is fine.

One would imagine that the present crisis, the economic mess caused by the abandonment among the economic class of all fiduciary responsibility and all due diligence in a headlong rush to securitize everything in sight (even grandma was in danger) would begin to wake up Americans, as it has awakened the world, to how dangerous torturing imperial fiscally irresponsible America has become.
The present economic team in Washington helped create the mess. Mr. Fox is not going to make the chicken house safe. He might be able to patch it up until the next outbreak occurs, but to expect a real critique of the system and a possibility of a radical change is ludicrous. It is impossible for those so imbued with an ideology to generate the perspective necessary to transform it.
A small group of people have been benefitting for 25 years in an economic system that has become a casino. A casino in which most of the bets have nothing to do with productivity or human well being.
Money has been making money not socially useful products. We do not need $680 trillion in derivatives or $38 trillion in credit default swaps to run the world economy.
The tail is wagging the dog and the dog is very ill due to the greed that financial instruments, irrelevant of productivity, have loosed within the system.
It’s time to end the experiment.
Individual selfishness does not sum to public good. The fable of the bees is wrong. The “invisible hand” is not functioning. Public good must be invoked again.
Production for the benefit of people must be the goal and private profit must be a factor in the equation not the ruling principle.
There is more to life than consumption and unless we see that quickly our behaviour will end life on earth as we know it.
For overriding all the above is a planetary biospheric crisis that if I were a grandchild to be, I would already be turning over in my grave to be, in anticipation of the destruction that this generation’s short-sighted behaviour is planning for me.
How many unusual weather events will it take before we wake up to the future we are creating for our progeny with each trip to the gas station.
What will it take to make us realise that our present consumptive lifestyle is more of a danger to our children than the Nazis were in 1941.
Who has the courage to mobilize the energy necessary to drive this awareness home?
We still have our eyes closed.
What will it take to open them or will we walk blindly into our own destruction?