Of late, hitting speed bumps in the road has loosened our thinking up sufficiently to create room for doubt. The party that had been the main bastion of neo-conservatism for the past thirty years - the Republican Party - is as discredited (some might say, reviled) as it is ever likely to become, especially among the better educated young. The situation presents a rare opportunity to take an honest look at our shortcomings and use government auspices to spearhead the alter-ethic of advancing the interests of the greater public against the opposed interests of a minority of wealthy individuals in the private sector.
Whatever tolerance we have shown up to now toward entrenched social inequities among ourselves we only indulged because the nation was seen to be so abundantly gifted by nature and opportunity that it was assumed that none but the laziest and most degraded among us could possibly be left without options in the event they were moved along by the eminent domain of growth. The displaced were presumed to have plenty of other ways of providing for whatever they might need.
But times have changed. The once seemingly inexhaustible national fecundity that allowed us to content ourselves with the moral out that we did not have to worry about the collateral costs of our socio-economic processes, is no longer. Whether this was ever actually true or just a myth, the idea that anyone could find greener pastures elsewhere, as long as they chose to expend the necessary effort, was commonly accepted.
In spite of it being a giant economy, it is not an unlimited one. Our social conclave is beset right now with far greater systemic and geophysical problems than at any time in the nation's history. Never before have we had to contend with the threat of progressive socio-economic decline on such a massive scale, while having to factor the very real danger of a collapse of the world's life-giving natural systems into whatever recovery plans we attempt to institute. Further, at this time, there are no easily exploitable fields of new development into which we can plunge that can stave off having to come to grips with the darker side of our national condition and our slipping rank within the current hierarchy of nations. To many around the globe, we are a bull in the china shop of a planetary community fighting for natural survival - a community that, by and large, has come to consider us the biggest offender in most of what seems to be going wrong with the natural and social mechanisms of the planet, not because they think we're bad people but, rather, because we're just flat-out inept.
Some assert the development of green technologies will save us: alternative energy is the great new economic frontier, they claim.
While green technologies are certainly a promising area of national enterprise, they are, as yet, far from enough to provide a boost of sufficient size for us to rekindle an optimistic sense of national condition among ourselves; and, already, China and India (among others) are aggressively undercutting the U.S. with cheaper products of comparable utility and quality which cost-conscious Americans have no compunctions about buying.
The truth of it is, if you happen to be one of the many millions either displaced or shunted aside, there are no greener pastures to which you can easily repair unless you have a huge pile of hidden cash to expend on that endeavor. What kind of displaced person has a huge pile of hidden cash? In short, the cheap seats on the bus to Easy Street are gone and woe to those who are left outside.
Faced with the enormity of this, the person of good conscience, intelligence and practical mind would probably agree - it's high time we retired socio-economic management based on dog-eat-dog principles. If the cost of moral indulgence now is only going to be profound complications for our children, and our children's children, later, why be indulgent for one minute longer?
Before it's too late, we have to clean house and divest ourselves of forms of entrenched thinking that no longer bring us benefit, forms of thinking that only serve to divide and weaken us.
Chief among those thought forms is that staple portion of the "American Dream" - a perversion, really - that there will always be an accepted place for grossly disparate personal material excess in our society, even as a growing segment numbering in the millions slips from having meaningful access to even the most basic forms of dignified providence. With most of the planet's primary resources now being stretched to the very limit by the competing demands of humankind, how can we justify that kind of truly senseless personal hyper-acquisitiveness, let alone laud it, even as those limits close in on us?
This perception of slowly drowning in a sea of planetary distress of our own making is not some hysterical or sentimental mush-pile, spawned in the counterculture disinformation mill, as some still try to claim. Rather, it's what the huge majority of Americans are gradually coming to realize is their probable future unless significant changes are made soon.
With the sole exception of the very rich - many of whom keep other homes abroad so they can get away when being here begins to get on their nerves - there is nothing to be seen ahead for most sectors of our society but protracted social and economic struggle. Whether it be at the individual, institutional or public level, we continue to borrow our way into uncharted territory just to stay afloat and prop up what is, essentially, a rotting economic corpse dolled up to look good.
To add dishonor to injury, the way we still deal with the daunting liabilities we are racking up is by shamelessly fobbing them off onto our children to deal with as best they may when their turn to sit in the hot seat comes around.
We know all of the above to be true. So, how is it that we can't seem to rise to dealing with these realities head on? How do we excuse ourselves the monumental indolence of meeting the most pressing of our moral challenges with the same discredited set of bankrupt approaches, doomed to disserve and fail before they ever hit the ground?
What I prefer to believe is that we are finally pretty much done with ducking the hard choices required to fix things. Like turning a page in a book, we will face the music, stop making excuses and implement a broad swath of radical reforms within the next decade, not because we want to, but because we finally acknowledge we have to in order to survive as a civil society.
Which gets me back to my initial question: How can we continue to indulge society doing nothing about people who receive fabled compensation packages even as other Americans who labor just as long and hard in different locales and situations actually end up going hungry or malnurishsed - along with their families - after non-elective monthly costs have been met?
In principle, of course, we cannot, because these are our sisters and brothers in nationhood; and yet, in practice, it's what we are still doing and will continue to do until the precepts that have ruled our thinking, deliberations and actions for too long are dramatically revised across the board.
Let me borrow some meat to put on the bones of my discontent by referring the reader to an appropriate book for the job - "Bad Money, Reckless Finance and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism" by Kevin Phillips. In it, one discovers the power of the inner circles of the executive class to inflate the importance of their contributions, not just to the civilized world but, more importantly, to themselves. That having been accomplished, it is easier for them to inflate perceptions of the deference that we, the ordinary, owe them in return for their services, whether they succeed or fail. (Notably, there have been some truly mind-boggling failures among those people since the release of Phillips' book.)
This trend of looking after Number One among America's highest paid has reached such outrageous proportions that top executive employment contracts often resemble the statutory privileges of royal families, with sumptuous cushions of extra cash promised for such things as moving expenses, car expenses, entertainment, not leaving, retiring and, of course, being fired, as if mere millions in the body of one's normal paycheck were somehow insufficient to deal with those contingencies in a satisfactory manner. It's just ridiculous!
Why do we put up with such outrageous self-aggrandizement? Isn't it time we, The People, put a serious damper on such boardroom largesse?
For the sake of the betterment of our society, we owe it to ourselves to try a little harder, instead, in defense of that seminal responsibility under the Constitution that the nation was forged in war to uphold: not just that we should protect citizens from harm but, also, that we should spare no effort or expense in creating and protecting meaningful opportunity for each and every human being under the legal protectorship of this republic - citizens and others alike - that they may enjoy the fruits of personal dignity and equality in daily association with their fellow human beings. How else are we going to coax into action America's next generation of job-creating entrepreneurs?
Lest we forget, it isn't just the individual that is being diminished by the current order. There are cumulative costs to society that must be taken into account.
Nothing so impedes the inherent right of people to bring the gifts of their inner strengths forward, to the ultimate enrichment of society, as paying them only enough to squeak by, day to day. Any influence that contributes to making the peonization of people ubiquitous or acceptable is inimical to the goals that our constitution was formed to serve.
What makes relative poverty so intolerable to those on the losing end - and deeply injurious to general social amity - is trying to deal with life on the leftover crumbs spilled from the table of gross disparity while a select few of one's contemporaries lavish upon themselves a state of almost incomprehensible excess. Even though such extreme financial excess is almost always a problematic thing to manage, those who have it rarely elect to trim their earnings to leave more for others who could use a boost. It's as if they consider the rest of us some kind of less developed worker species equipped by evolution to be more able to tolerate the privations levied by financial paucity.
This is not semantic conjecture. I'm being perfectly serious. It was, precisely, the outlook of white South Africans toward blacks under apartheid when I lived there and, when it was codified into law as the Job Reservation Act, it allowed whites to accept it as an unavoidable fact of life - entirely natural - and, therefore, not something they should have to question or worry about. It may be hard to credit, but the very same thought form is tacitly at work in the United States today. When it comes to certain kinds of work, the general attitude is that certain kinds of people lower down on the pecking order are going to do it. Similarly, there's also a mirror attitude that certain kinds of high paying work should be reserved for those whose developed sensibilities and superior education are best suited to it, and that leaving the balance of more distasteful and poorly paid work for tougher, less educated, lower-ranking groups is socially acceptable. In the case of apartheid-era South Africa, it was seen as a white versus non-white dichotomy. Here, in America, while skin color definitely enters into it, the real divide between people considered deserving of exquisite consideration and those deserving of far less comes down to more subtle delineations of money and influence - like where you were born, whether you're a native or an immigrant, where you went to school, your professional associates, educational pedigree, what part of town you live in, family connections, income, sex, etc. Like it or not, there’s always some kind of profile by which you can be devalued and used accordingly for the greater convenience of those with higher social status. How else can one account for the following concentrations within the job market - Latinos in the lower paid ranks of agriculture, construction, hospitality and maintenance; Africans in the least desirable health and eldercare jobs; Sikhs in the taxi industry; Ethiopians and Eritreans in 24-hour convenience stores; Filipinos in the lowest ranks of the merchant marine industry; and American black males in the collection end of waste management?
The real reason for these worker clusterings is that, outside of those sectors, work with better conditions and pay is disproportionately difficult to track down because tacit social hurdles impede the process of applying for those positions, getting them and then successfully holding on to them.
The conscionable in society ought to be concerned by the fact that the main driver of social disparity - income disparity - is effectuated, for the most part, by varying degrees of conscious and unconscious collusion among those of a relatively small subset who decide what Americans get paid. This close-knit professional clique and their agents (lawyers, consultants, accountants and the like), by and large, maintain a calculated and willful indifference toward the national need for greater social equity.
Ideally, it wouldn’t be that way. The interests of the nation are not well served by it.
If ever the use of the power of the People in defense of the Greater Good were to be deemed justifiable and laudable, using it to lift up the common right to live in a more cohesive social collective would have to be one of the most obvious.
This basic tenet is more especially true in a time of war. The sons and daughters of citizens in lower economic circles are playing a preponderant role on the field of battle, in part, to preserve the interests of the rich (almost none of whom have kin in harm's way). Given they do so at grave risk to the psychological well-being of their families and their own lives, no lower standard of common reciprocity ought be tolerated.
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