Not sure how I connected with your site here, but I found your commentary to be interesting. I'm almost 80, so a lot of this won't affect me. I'll die and be forgotten (unless I perform some public evil deed) and my kids will get all my "stuff" (most of which they won't know what to do with or how to use or what value it all might have) and after converting into cash (if it is still "a thing") will fund their own "dream." I know when I was 25 my wife and I tried to get away, but it was only to a county in Kentucky where we were "fish out of water." "Back to the land;" another fantasy. 8 billion people in the world and the 350 M+ in the US are the cause of all the suffering and unhappiness of everyone? Well, I'm sure flattered. It couldn't be that even if the young here are having less sex and fewer babies, someone elsewhere sure is, 'cause not everyone is dying fast enough anymore from centuries of starvation, disease, and mass wars, etc. I don't know "Gerald" (he's about my kids' ages), but I hope he's saving his pennies to run away with a quasi-capitalist grubstake and maybe become the 21st century version of "the ugly American." My grandparents ran away from Slovakia and Canada respectively in 1900 to come here. 125 years later here I am. What would I go "back": to there? It couldn't be that "endless growth" of anything is the ticket to chaos? Or that knowing what every idiot (even those who have no food and can't pay the rent) is thinking about every single second has any value to my navigating "life?" It's always a new version of "Brave New World. And it's always crumbling, only the distances and time-frame have shrunk. Here's a thought: Let's say there was a "God," and you went to him and wanted to be someone else somewhere else. So He takes you to a room and hands you a ping-pong ball with your name on it. And there's a big pit filled with 8 billion ping-pong balls with others' names on it. "Ok," He says, "toss your ball in there and just pick another one out." Would that be a "good" deal? If you lived here (USA, today) would you take the risk? Just askin'...
GenX here, ‘73. After 10 years in the US together starting our family (the first four of our five children), in 2014 I suggested that we move to my wife’s native Japan. This country looks rich to my American eyes - because everything’s still functional instead of dysfunctional: both the physical & institutional infrastructures are still functional, healthy. That said, certainly I do suffer homesickness every day, but the move was ultimately all about the children’s futures & us parents’ future end-of-life experience.
… 1995 was my political wake up call. We were in Nowhere Special, France, university students. Sometime after midnight my future wife came down with the first & only UTI of her life.
A young doctor arrived faster than pizza delivery, and administered a shot, and wrote a prescription. The house call cost only $10 (in 1995 USD; that’d be like $40-$50 today 😂 but still a bargain!) And the prescription cost only $6(?); the pharmacy was just around the corner - no car needed, no waiting, no insurance needed.
My political awakening began with the “evils” of socialist medicine. (That means socialist, not communist!)
‘They’ (i.e. my childhood indoctrination in “unbridled capitalism”) had been lying to us about everything, not just medicine it turns out, but e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. 😡: employment conditions/ workers’ rights, education, housing, transportation, zoning & small business regulation, the denatured & adulterated food supply, etc., just everything, welfare, Big Pharma, etc.. As my awareness continued to grow, the list of institutional & infrastructure dysfunction just kept growing longer ‘n’ longer over the years 😡
And really, I kept looking for a way out of the US’s “middle class squeeze” ever since 1995. It was lonely talking about it back then because my fellow Americans (Boomers & GenX) didn’t see the problems.
… What a boon social media has been. At least I’m connected now to people who see the problems 👍🙂 “A problem shared is a problem halved.”
Your examples are an indication of an out of control social breakdown. Whether by design or by default it's happening. Like during covid, some consequences were intended and some weren't.
The fallout from years of indoctrination, the erosion of values in favor of relentless pursuit of wealth is upon us. The "american dream" was a pipe dream all along it seems.
The ship is foundering and steerage isn't going to cut it.
Not sure how I connected with your site here, but I found your commentary to be interesting. I'm almost 80, so a lot of this won't affect me. I'll die and be forgotten (unless I perform some public evil deed) and my kids will get all my "stuff" (most of which they won't know what to do with or how to use or what value it all might have) and after converting into cash (if it is still "a thing") will fund their own "dream." I know when I was 25 my wife and I tried to get away, but it was only to a county in Kentucky where we were "fish out of water." "Back to the land;" another fantasy. 8 billion people in the world and the 350 M+ in the US are the cause of all the suffering and unhappiness of everyone? Well, I'm sure flattered. It couldn't be that even if the young here are having less sex and fewer babies, someone elsewhere sure is, 'cause not everyone is dying fast enough anymore from centuries of starvation, disease, and mass wars, etc. I don't know "Gerald" (he's about my kids' ages), but I hope he's saving his pennies to run away with a quasi-capitalist grubstake and maybe become the 21st century version of "the ugly American." My grandparents ran away from Slovakia and Canada respectively in 1900 to come here. 125 years later here I am. What would I go "back": to there? It couldn't be that "endless growth" of anything is the ticket to chaos? Or that knowing what every idiot (even those who have no food and can't pay the rent) is thinking about every single second has any value to my navigating "life?" It's always a new version of "Brave New World. And it's always crumbling, only the distances and time-frame have shrunk. Here's a thought: Let's say there was a "God," and you went to him and wanted to be someone else somewhere else. So He takes you to a room and hands you a ping-pong ball with your name on it. And there's a big pit filled with 8 billion ping-pong balls with others' names on it. "Ok," He says, "toss your ball in there and just pick another one out." Would that be a "good" deal? If you lived here (USA, today) would you take the risk? Just askin'...
GenX here, ‘73. After 10 years in the US together starting our family (the first four of our five children), in 2014 I suggested that we move to my wife’s native Japan. This country looks rich to my American eyes - because everything’s still functional instead of dysfunctional: both the physical & institutional infrastructures are still functional, healthy. That said, certainly I do suffer homesickness every day, but the move was ultimately all about the children’s futures & us parents’ future end-of-life experience.
… 1995 was my political wake up call. We were in Nowhere Special, France, university students. Sometime after midnight my future wife came down with the first & only UTI of her life.
A young doctor arrived faster than pizza delivery, and administered a shot, and wrote a prescription. The house call cost only $10 (in 1995 USD; that’d be like $40-$50 today 😂 but still a bargain!) And the prescription cost only $6(?); the pharmacy was just around the corner - no car needed, no waiting, no insurance needed.
My political awakening began with the “evils” of socialist medicine. (That means socialist, not communist!)
‘They’ (i.e. my childhood indoctrination in “unbridled capitalism”) had been lying to us about everything, not just medicine it turns out, but e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. 😡: employment conditions/ workers’ rights, education, housing, transportation, zoning & small business regulation, the denatured & adulterated food supply, etc., just everything, welfare, Big Pharma, etc.. As my awareness continued to grow, the list of institutional & infrastructure dysfunction just kept growing longer ‘n’ longer over the years 😡
And really, I kept looking for a way out of the US’s “middle class squeeze” ever since 1995. It was lonely talking about it back then because my fellow Americans (Boomers & GenX) didn’t see the problems.
… What a boon social media has been. At least I’m connected now to people who see the problems 👍🙂 “A problem shared is a problem halved.”
Your examples are an indication of an out of control social breakdown. Whether by design or by default it's happening. Like during covid, some consequences were intended and some weren't.
The fallout from years of indoctrination, the erosion of values in favor of relentless pursuit of wealth is upon us. The "american dream" was a pipe dream all along it seems.
The ship is foundering and steerage isn't going to cut it.