American Survival

This is very much what I have been feeling over the past year or so. It amazes me that someone else also has this perspective. I watch television, I know, too much, but from this amazing medium comes such a combination of senseless idiocy and obssessive materialism that I am stunned by its pervasive ferocity. Absolutely stunned. Yet, I find myself caught up in this whirling dervish of endless products and smiling beauty that I begin to evaluate my own life against what I see there. I become dissastisfied that I am too fat, too poor, ill groomed, ignorant, and totally out of touch with the 'real' America. I am not rich and pretty. I don't drive a sleek sportcar and I don't command a large corporation or sail a boat on weekends. I just don't fit in with this 'American Image'.

Everytime I go to the store, any store, it dosen't matter which, I see an endless row of products to buy. The choice is staggering. The quantity is beyond reason. There is everything I could possibly want, and more. Sometimes I worry that the world is passing me by because I don't own more stuff.

Then I look at my garage and find that I don't know what to do with most of the stuff I have now. So I give it away to Salvation Army or Goodwill. Some I hang on to because I know I will need it someday, like that oak bathroom towel rack, those tennis shoes that still have life in them, countless tools and metal braces, a derelict vacuum sweeper, curtain rods, and more boxes of old ill fitting clothing than I can imagine. So I take it to Goodwill, turn it in, then head inside to see if they have any more junk I can buy. I have found myself buying my own donations back again, how is that for crazy?

We are a driven people, probably the only culture on earth whose entire economy us based on the citizens' accumulation of stuff. Consumer shopping has replaced factories, manufacturing plants, and farming. What is the business of America? Shopping. We buy endless dooddads and gimcracks; fru fru and 'what-cha-ma-call-its'. What is even more amazing is that we don't make any of this stuff. It all comes from overseas, some foreign place. While the rest of the world is busy making stuff and creating stuff, designing, planning, producing, Americans are mindlessly shopping.

Well, we are truly a product of our culture and our civilization will go down in history and one of the most pathetic and wasted efforts of humanity. Yeah, we did some good things, medicine, medical care, innovative manufacturing and supplying, designing and creating. But we don't do that anymore, we just shop.

Read this whole article here, this one is really well written.

Beyond Mere Survival in the American Economic Dystopia
by Jason Miller


“Most Americans still do not realize that they are enslaved to the ruling elite, a group with a savage, relentless devotion to avarice, the blind pursuit of money, and the domination of Earth's people and resources. Under the Bush Regime, the mask of civility, morality, and democracy has slipped to the point that the hideous visage of raw capitalism and imperialistic ambition is almost completely exposed. Yet somehow, as over a hundred thousand lie dead in Iraq, the Patriot Act strips our civil liberties, the wealth gap widens to a chasm, Big Brother has been caught watching (and is unrepentant), billions of dollars are wasted on occupations of sovereign nations, habeas corpus disappears, America engages in torture regularly, property rights precede human rights, and a major city lays in ruins due to the willful neglect of a government charged by the Constitution with promoting the general welfare, many Americans still cannot, or will not, dare to even glimpse at the lurid countenance of evil leering at them from Washington…”

But here is what is truly important;

“…This doesn’t have to stand. America has exhibited true greatness in the past. Think of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. This is the nation that spawned the Abolitionist Movement. The powerful Labor Movement arose in the Twentieth Century and claimed unprecedented rights and protections for the working class. The Civil Rights Movement made powerful gains for minorities and the oppressed. Women won the right to vote. Populists made strides for farmers and the working class. Anti-war protestors broke the will of the military industrial complex to continue their genocidal “pacification” of the Vietnamese. Progressives have been a significant force for social changes to benefit humanity since the 1890’s. There are still champions for the oppressed in America and spiritually enlightened values are woven into the fabric of our culture…”

Gosh, makes ya just want to go out there...and shop.