So, help me here. I know we here in the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free have entered hard times, from a middle class American perspective, though hardly from a global perspective.
Truly hard times will be when we start starving to death, which, of course, may yet happen in the U.S., as it did in the Depression 75 years ago, but I doubt it.
This country continues to maintain a huge advantage in resource consumption per person over the rest of the world. Why, exactly, do we deserve this position?
Only on the basis of military power. Thus we have many, diverse enemies, with more emerging from the ghettos and slums in Third World cities every single day.
We also have a young, brilliant, President-elect, who may be our last, best hope to survive the coming disaster that threatens to engulf all peace-loving people, not to mention all animals and plants around the globe.
Will we come together behind his leadership and find a new path to survival, or will we go the way of the Dinosaur.
As Bob Dylan would say, "the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind."
1 comment:
Simple is as simple does.
Again, it's the mistaken notion that measuring fairness of outcomes yields moral equivalence; simply consuming more must equal immoral behavior.
The premise invoked by injecting the moral concept of “deserve” is flawed.
We consume what we do because we can. We can because, as a nation, we have shed blood, sweat, and tears in the continuous struggle to build a society which promotes the best in human activity. That society is founded in personal liberty, without which no other characteristic of living has real meaning.
Too many today fail to understand these concepts sufficiently well to appreciate what actually provides our “wealth” as a people. Providing individual liberty for citizens of this great nation must be the “prime directive” of our political structure. And, the measure of our success will not be found in equality of outcomes.
Looking to those outcomes to provide either a measure for success or a recipe for achieving greater success is a simple (aka simpleminded) view. The human drama is far more complex, far more dynamic. To ignore this is to cheapen the value of individual lives.
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