http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/577
Yeah, like he said.
America is a bastard society, composed of mongrels and sports.
We have no basis for tribal, racial or ethnic loyalties, like those healthy societies in the mid-east and Africa.
Instead, we are a ‘rising tides float all boats’ sort of operation where everyone’s self-interest is somehow tied to the general well-being of the entire country. We are ‘the melting pot’, for better or worse.
If the country degenerates into feudalism, then the middle class dies. If the middle class dies, then the source of creativity and innovation that has made us US will also die.
I like making enough money that I can spend time philosophising and puttering around on the farm.
But I see many many people around me in (and am just a few paychecks away from myself,) the state where they cannot afford the luxury of self-expression.
Life carries us along, like leaves downstream, whether we want to go or not.
We do what we can to help our kids and grandkids survive, what more can we do?
We can try to select and promote a system that provides reasonable benefits and safeguards to a reasonable number of people.
In the past, in other countries, this meant fighting alongside your tribe against all outside groups.
This is the biological imperative. In this country however, there is no tribe. If we tried to follow our strictly glandular instincts, we would fractionate into a thousand warring factions. We only have to look at Yugoslavia, Burundi or Iraq to see what happens when a sense of common identity is lost. Is this what we want America to become?
What is the alternative?
Let’s admit that economic classes DO exist.
Let’s get back to the idea that a ‘level playing field’ that favors good ideas over entrenched, inherited, political and economic power, is the best mechanism that we know of so far to engender technological and economic progress.
What does this mean in terms of real decisions?
1) restrict the influence that lobbyists have over legislation
2) restrict the influence that political advertising has over the electorate
3) break up media conglomerates and encourage regional media that are sensitive to regional needs
4) devise an uncorruptable, unfalsifiable, efficient method for voting and mandate its use
Now I know that these goals are vague, and would require actual participation and thought by large numbers of citizens.
The alternative? Line up here, fellow serf, to get your serial number tattoo.