#201924 by
Kramerguy
Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:24 pm
lalong and Talbot,
Thanks for the well-thought-out and insightful posts. There's a lot to chew on between them.
Glenn,
Your response actually supports my overall feelings and point of this thread- that we do, for the most part, all want the same things. We agree that corporations have completely infiltrated, corrupted, and rendered our governing body useless and worse: dangerous. Dangerous to our perceived ways of life, thinking, and happiness.
What we never seem to agree on is how to correct it. How to return to what we once had. I'm a working class devout. My family came here generations ago as working class. And while we've enjoyed american growth and freedoms, each generation has struggled more- doing the same level of work. There was once a time that a janitor, a dishwasher, a doorman, and a grocery store employee could eek out a living- and while that may have been a meager living by national standards, it was still a living, and most importantly- that man had stability. No job paid so little that basic healthcare and medicine became a "discretionary" expense.
We had that because our policies in that time were much more friendly to the working class. They didn't get it easy- they had to fight for it, oftentimes in bloody revolt, to create the unions that held the middle class together for more than 60 years. The minimum wage was enough for a single man or woman to live on, albeit meagerly as I've stated. That hasn't been true since about 1971. Women had to go to work, lending to our 'latch-key kids', which arguably are part of the downfall of society we're discussing. People have had to get 2nd and sometimes 3rd jobs, leading to misery, anti-social behavior; and capitalist mantra "I got mine" has invaded our society and plagued us into hating our neighbors who fall on hard times. When a friend falls on hard times, we don't all get together and help him stay afloat (which he may or may not return the favor when another friend falls), we do the opposite - we distance ourselves from them, so they can't "drag us down" with them, we isolate them. We isolate anyone who doesn't 'fit in', rather than accepting them as equal parts of society. We wonder why isolated people shoot up schools and malls, yet fail to even notice the one stunning factor in nearly all of these cases is that WE isolated them, as a person, people, society.
I've said many times, I'd gladly go back to that vs. what we have today. We were more socially tuned to each other, had a much better work / compensation / life balance. What has corrupted that is greed.
Greed is the alter that capitalism worships, which is why I'm so adverse to it. I don't deny that it has positives; I only point out that I personally feel that today, it's become a monster whose flaws far outweigh the benefits.
We can blame deregulation, corruption, and 100 other things, but we can't seem to agree on what the finished product should look like. There's many here who honestly believe that an unregulated market would fix things, whereas to me- that seems insane, considering that my feelings on deregulations have attributed to the collapse of the moral fiber of corporate america.
