I was wondering when its going to come to a head and what we will do when it does. It seems like we are all just hanging out in denial about the downward spiral and inevitable crash and burn we are headed for in our country.
I remember back in the 70′s when we had the oil embargo. We had to wait in lines that stretched for blocks to get gas and it was rumored that it was going up to one dollar a gallon. This is a lot considering when I was a kid it was 33 cents a gallon. Oh yeah, I should mention I’m only 50 years old. Now we are heading for five bucks a gallon and it’s rumored to go higher.
It’s a vicious circle of which the malice is supplied by those who already have more money than they can use. Mr. Greedyrichguy wants to make a certain amount of profit every month. He sets a price. We say we can’t drive as much since the price is getting higher and hold back. He sees he isn’t making the same profit so he raises prices again. The others that need the fuel to deliver their products like food, medicines and building materials need to raise their products. The key word there is “need”. See they need to raise their prices because it’s a cost of their business. The utilities need to do the same. However Mr. Greedyrichguy who owns the oil companies doesn’t. He has all the resources he needs to do whatever he wants. He just tells the government that the $23 billion dollars he makes in a quarter is needed for exploration and research. Too bad he’s not researching how to make those patents and plans of carburetors that get 125 miles to the gallon better instead of hiding them. Too bad he killed that electric car that was doing so well. Why should he?
I remember when Bush senior said we were a nation of consumers. That sent a chill down my back. When you get everything from everyone else, they can hold you hostage in your own country by not sending you anything. It’s a very old, long term military strategy for conquering an empire.
When we were the world’s strongest empire we had no real competition. We could burn up all the resources we wanted and bribe the governments of struggling countries to let us hack and chop our way through their land to do and take whatever we want. Now Mr. Greedyrichguy has China and India willing and able to pay the price he wants to set for his fuel and he cut a deal with their governments to give him real cheap labor without those pesky laws he has to deal with here.
Meanwhile, back in the States…Bubbuh can’t drive as far as he needs to go to work. His contractor doesn’t care because he has a new shipment of Mexicans that are cheaper than his last ones. Bubbuh can’t speak Spanish anyway. Bubbuh has a shorter work radius from his home because of the gas prices. He would buy a smaller car, if he had the extra cash. No one wants to buy his truck and the people selling small cars know they can get top dollar now.
Brewster the office boy got laid off because his company sent his job to Bazerkistan. God help you if you call there for customer service. Women are having to deal with rising daycare to dealing with more crap from bosses who can have them replaced in a heartbeat, knowing that jobs are getting harder to come by. The kids that go to school get cutbacks from food and condensed classes to learning implements.
Insurance companies are jamming everybody every way they can, and getting away with it. What other business has the strategy of, “give me money, and I won’t give it back”. (Now if I’m making you feel stressed don’t worry. They have pills for that.)
Oh yeah, back to Bubbuh and his family. (They’re so easy to forget about) He can’t get unemployment. Seems he doesn’t fit the criteria as well as the minorities do. He is also a little confused why the “refugees” that wash up on our shores get loans and all kinds of goodies when they get here but that’s another story.
Bubbuh needs to sit down and get his mind off things so he watches the history channel, while he still has cable. He watches how ancient armies would keep supplies from going into an empire and how surrounding merchants would see the opportunity and using excuses like security and terrorism, they would raise their prices. Finally the empire would start to eat itself up from the inside out. A couple of natural disasters is the icing on the cake. Finally, the empire falls and all of its enemies, old and new, come to get their piece. Bubbuh’s son walks in and ask him what he’s watching. Bubbuh answers, “our future”.
Back when I was in school we studied history since it has a habit of repeating itself. Mr. Greedyrichguy comes from a long lineage of people who finance colonizing operations, fund both sides of wars and buy governments that they didn’t build themselves. Now Mr.G and his homeys have one thing that always causes him problems. Those damned independent thinkers. Those individualists that just don’t want to play the game. They are always coming up with some new idea that gets people off track, like alternative energy. Not another fossil fuel derivative but something completely different, like solar energy. Then they go do community gardens in some old lot where people used to illegally dump.
Mr. G sees this as a problem since people won’t be buying the genetically engineered food he sells. The cops can’t make money off of busting people for illegally dumping in that lot anymore. (I actually lived in a city, Coral Springs Florida where vegetable gardens were against city code) Anyways these same people revive the art of canning and drying foods and ate from local growers. No matter. By this time a pineapple will cost $20 in New York and $10 for an apple in Florida with the fuel costs.
How did we get here? Apathy and general laziness. As long as we could afford the gas and had something to watch on TV we didn’t care. Instead of continuing the radical behavior of questioning authority we started in the 60s we went to flag waving obesity.
One thing that you will here the generals of militaries we’ve fought say about the American mentality. We can be very unpredictable. Especially when we get pushed into a corner. When most peoples will give up, we will pull some wild idea out of our ass and make it work. It’s time to reach where the sun don’t shine.
I’ve made solar water heaters out of garden hoses. Ever spray your self after the hose has been laying in the Sun a while? You can coil it, put it in a shallow wooden box with a Plexiglas cover or whatever else you can think of. I saw a story of an African kid that made a windmill generator. Every little bit helps.
Stop eating until you are full and just eat until you aren’t hungry anymore. Most toxins are stored in your fat cells.
Do the community garden thing. Be ok with telling able bodied people who don’t want to help you to get lost at harvest time. If they can’t do the physical labor they can sort seeds, can, research or anything that helps.
Learn to can foods. It’s easy. Eat locally.
Don’t worry if you don’t smell “pretty”. There are a lot of things that are bad for you that get hidden under the label of “fragrance”.
Eco blog. Find out what other positive people are doing. Share info, it’s a team sport.
Some desperately needed measures.
Birth control. It’s ok. Truth is, if you don’t have a lot of people, you don’t need a lot of resources. Unfortunately the out of control breeding is by the people who love to milk the system. The more people find out that income tax only goes to welfare organizations, up to 100,000 people refuse to pay. Not something you’ll hear about. You think the IRS is trying to get a better image because they care? Gas pays for roads and property tax pays for schools. You pay for welfare.
Ronald Reagan told every American my age that when I was ready to collect social security, it wouldn’t be there. I’m paying for his generation.
Tell the government to stop fucking around. Didn’t they tell us that the oil we would get would pay for the war? We showed those people how to do oil. They owe us. By the way, did you or anyone you know get any of that bailout money?
Every politician talks change but the only thing that changes is the hue of the same picture.
Be prepared. Everything comes from someplace else and it needs fossil fuel to get there. Everything will go up in prices if somewhere in its existence it needed transportation, electricity, heating, cooling….think about it. Every phase of its manufacturing, processing and transportation will raise the price. The only thing that won’t go up is your wages. Some people have been offered pay cuts to stay employed.
Close the borders. Enough is enough. I had to learn Spanish to keep working and now I’m learning Portuguese. Look, these people send the money outside the United States. Listen the next time politicians talk about a bill that is supposed to create job. They won’t say where or for whom and they won’t take the measures that the money earned stays here.
Back when gas was soaring to a dollar a gallon, I was a carpenter making $10 an hour. Construction was a good trade for a man to be in. I could rent a nice 2 bedroom apartment for $300 a month. My electric was about $30 a month. I paid my monthly bills on one weeks pay when I lived in Arlington Va. which is just outside of Wash. D.C. The average pay for a carpenter now is $15 an hour. Scales have tipped some.
We will get out of this but we have to push now to decide how well we fare at it. Will wages only go up a little in the next 30 years? Will “Made in America” labels be some historical artifact sold on Ebay?
Something you get used to living in South Florida is the inevitable hurricane season. We know its coming. We know it will suck, we just don’t know how bad. We know that if we get trashed we will be on our own until Mr. G and the boyz figure out how to cash in on us. We just get as prepared as we can, every year. At least we know it’s coming. I’m wondering if the bottom falls out after the election, no matter who wins, and we, the country, end up like those people in the mid West. They go to sleep with the crickets and birds singing only to wake up to a tornado that you can’t hide from.
I think we still have the choice in our economic future of the tornado or hurricane. If we admit we let this happen by our apathy and choose to collectively fix it, we will have the hurricane. If we continue to do what I call “Republican Yoga” (ignoring everything around you by shoving your head up your ass) we get the tornado.
The war. I really try to think in a balanced way. I ask myself “What would someone have to do to me and my people for me to go to a foreign country and learn to fly massive airplanes so I can die by crashing them into a massive building and talk my buddies into doing the same thing.” I find it hard to believe they did that just because we have different religions. Yeah, they have oil there and they have the highest quality of cadmium and fuel grade uranium there. Which do you think Mr. G wants the most?
I do know that if we were being occupied by any foreign force, for any reason, I would be killing them everyday until they left.
I wish I knew the whole truth. I do know we need our money here. We need to change from developing technology that can destroy the world a few times over to improving the quality of global life. Health, food, and energy shouldn’t be poker chips for Mr. G and the boyz.
I wish I could talk to some people over there and let the everyday working man know that I, personally, really don’t want to take anything that belongs to him. I’d also tell him he needs to get on the move to get his country together because we are leaving soon. I’m sure we did some good there but we have some important things to do at home. It’s costing us everything we have left and the only person that’s making money on it is Mr. G.
Time to get real. If we want to be seen as leaders, great. Let’s give the rest of the world have something good to see from us. A country with an outstanding environmental stand, a people who really don’t need to be too concerned with health care and pioneer the way to a real alternative energy science.
Yeah, I ranted a little but is anyone else wondering when this craziness will end?
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