Hey all, just wanted to make an observation of mine public:
What people think about when they think about America is one thing--a place of dreams where you can buy anything you want freely, where your possessions are protected, where there is stability and opportunity and jobs. A place where you have rights and the law man or the tax man can't just levy a tax and take away your things.
And then there is what america actually is.
In America, we have a three class system: at the top of the system is the 1%. Typically the 1% are self-made billionaires, which sounds like the American Dream, right? --Except the real path to reaching the 1% is to find a flaw in the system and exploit it until you make it on top and then close that exploit so that others can't repeat it. Many of the 1% come from wealthy families, its true, they come from the top 20% or even the top 10%, but the top 10% isn't unachievable. A hard-working and smart-investing family can rise from the bottom 5% to the top 10% during their life time and leave their children to carry the banner the rest of the way to the top 1%. So yes, in some ways, the American Dream is real, but before you settle in and feel good about things, lets focus back on the 1%. The top 1% of American society are cheaters. They are exploiters. They are liars and distorters, and they are ruthless. They put on a good show because the wealthiest of the wealthiest, Mark Zuk, Warren Buff, Elon Musk, Bill Gates--they all have a good PR. Many people love them--if not, they wouldn't be able to continue lying and cheating and getting away with things. --THAT is the American Dream.
The next class is the politician. You're going to think this is the same old same old, so I'll spare you the details: Politicians are pigs and liars. You don't survive in politics by being a good person. If you don't accomplish something big in your first term, people forget about you and then don't vote fore you next go around unless you get lucky and your opponents are worse. Politicians get to stay in office by lying--and in a sick and twisted way they think that their lies are "For the better good" they think they are being ethical and that they're in the right, otherwise, why continue? Why be such a useless piece of shit and waste of space for society and yet continue to fill a role for society that requires you to at least listen to what the public is complaining about? --They all think they are heroes. They think that they're the only one who can push forward some idealized version of the future and they do everything they can to push for that future. It's actually quite pathetic because what we really expect a politician to be is to look after the current interests of the people in their jurisdiction, but the reality is that all politicians are looking out for future peoples who may or may not exist ever. Even when they succeed at bringing their vision for the future, the people they bring it for are too old or dead to really appreciate it. The reason for this is that you don't accomplish anything in politics without a mind for the long form. Everything a politician does is a long con in hopes of bringing a future about. The big problem is that they can't predict how people are going to be in the future and can't provide political wins for their future constituents. It sucks, but we're at least 10 or 20 years behind politically what we are socially on every front. Todays Boomers are starting to get the things they wanted 20 years ago, but now those boomers are leaving the workforce and in need to medical care--too bad they didn't care about taking care of the elderly 20 years ago, if they did, they would have elected people who would look for their retirement and make it a surety. Now, social security is a question, social trends hvae changed and their politicians are batting the wrong way and doomed to be scorned, and medical care is going to continue skyrocketing.
LAstly, there is the working class. For all intents and purposes, the working class are really plebs. They're the 99%. The people who actually work, the people who do things for society and make sure "shit gets done." The plebs are all working for 1 of 2 things: retirement and death, or to accrue wealth to pass on to their kids and grandkids. The bottom 90% is so concerned about making it into the top 10% and the top 10% are either working to make it into the top 1% or to just make it to retirement. All this hard work that the plebs are doing just to survive causes them to forget that there is more to life than just working. They often just follow trends because they don't have time to think for themselves and develop a personality enough to set trends. Or they're so focused on the "Someday I'll retire..." and they work themselves to the bone to reach retirement only to die before they get to enjoy retirement.
Meanwhile, our nation was founded to make the field more equal for everyone. It was supposed to do away with the ultra powerful king, the Absolute Monarch, the Dictator. Europe wasn't so bad anciently, there were many factions and the lack of centralized power made it so that someone on the outskirts could avoid the local lord's prying eye and then they could get away with things. Then monarchy progressed to where it became more stable to centralize the role and ultimately have just one king to rule the country. Then kings made alliances with other kings to protect their domains, and finally people rose up who had ambitions to rule the entire world, and the only way to do that would be to have absolute power within the nation. Thus, the Absolute Monarch was born in France.
In the US, we started as several fractured states each with their own laws and forms of government. Eventually the states bonded together to support the idea of slavery and keep their economic power, but other states who had a conscious recognized that slave power isn't fair and isn't what the nation was founded on (remember? the idea that everyone is equal and can do whatever they want so long as they aren't hurting anyone--Liberty? Libertarianism? One of the great founding principles?). So they rallied under one leader who fought the civil war to make everyone equal again. The civil war was supposed to re-center the nation, and in many ways it did, but the politicians who pushed for it were doing so for the peoples of before the war. After the war there were more people, different people, freed people who had a different voice and different wants and needs. It took another 50+ years for those people to get hte right politicians in office who would push for their future. And then there was a counter push when those politicans finally made some ground and they restricted people again after 50 more years. And then there was a little bit more freedom and equality....
Some people describe this as the liberal pendulum or the progressive pendulum. Really, it comes down to the fact that American democracy doesn't accomplish anything quickly and by the time it accomplishes what people wanted now, the people who wanted it and had the majority and had the power--Those people--they're gone. And the new majority, the ones that are pissed off about this thing happening that htey don't agree with, then they form a movement that takes another 10-30 years and after that amount of time they get what they want.
But I'm not the same as I was 10 years ago, or 20, or 30.
What I want right now, I'm not sure if it will even be relevant in 30 years.
Things I care about are climate mitigation, and in 30 years its too late. Removing the power that fossil fuels have on our nation would be great in 20 years, but I fear it might be too late. Damage will be done and we can't go back to the environment we had when I was a child. I care about personal liberty--not liberty over all but Personal Liberty. I think what I do with my personal property, my body, my toothbrush, the items in my inventory, should be completely up to me. I think anything that is connected cell-to-cell to my body should be under my jurisdiction, but me in 20 years might change my mind once people start adding circuity to their bodies to enhance their abilities so that they can become super beings and purge the earth of non-super beings. Or genetically modify themselves. --Yeah, I might change my mind in 20 years and say there are limits. That said, I don't know the future and no body does, and even if somebody could accurately see the future, no one now would understand it enough to care to invest in it for the rest of humanity. Instead, one of the 10% would exploit it so that they could be the 1% and then close it off so that no one else could benefit from it.
Sorry if this is classist. Sorry if this is doom-and-gloom.
I just think America has failed. It has failed to give people what they want, which is what they want right now, not later. And when they get it later, it's contrary to what the people of the then-now want. So if you live in the present, you're getting something you don't want that someone else wanted and you'll have to wait to get the thing that you actually want and you may not live to get it. A better form of government or social structure would be one that can give you what you want right now, or one that can predict what you will want in the future and give it to you when that future occurs.
I almost wonder if it isn't possible to design laws in a way that they are triggered by future predicted events and that we can change those laws up until they happen so that they can be modified to be exactly what we will need. Like: a law 50 years ago would have been nice "in case" global warming surpassed an average of 1 degree C. Then suddenly fossil fuel is forced to scale down. If it was on the books, the fossil fuel industry would be prepared for it and less people would be investing in it if they saw the temperature rising 0.5C or 0.75C because they'd realize there was a limit to it.
Maybe we could write a law on how we would treat an alien species if one was discovered, and until then, we wouldn't have to do anything other than leave it on the books.
But I digress. That's a reality I will never live in. People barely have forethought to save money for retirement, why would they have the forethought to prepare for something that might happen?
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