in case you're wondering whether the United States is the so-called leader of the free world, the answer is...
yes and no. Yes because we have a huge military budget, and that gives us a big stick to wave around, and gives us a nice sense of self-importance.
No because we're not the only people making great rock 'n roll anymore, and for another, much more obvious reason that many people here seems to want to ignore, but that is staring us in the face just the same. And until we face that obvious reason and do something about it, we are going to become more and more third world. And maybe it's a good thing.
Follow me after the fold as I try to explain something that should be obvious to everybody.
A person came to me the other day, to do some complex white collar work. As we talked, he told me that his daughter and her husband had just moved back in, and that his son and his wife, who had just had a baby, were due to move back into his house in a couple of months.
The reasons are complex; his daughter and her husband have lost their house, due to foreclosure. The daughter still has her job, but her husband has lost his.
His son? It's pretty much the same story.
As some of you know, I play classical Indian music, and when I went to India, back in the 70s, it was common for older children and parents to live together, sometimes a dozen people in one house, three generations living together. The so-called "nuclear family", that strange perversion so perfectly exemplified in "leave it to beaver", really didn't exist there. There were no nursing homes either; the thought of sending older members of the family to some strange place to die was absolutely horrifying, not to mention that it would've been way too expensive. Besides, grandpa and grandma's wisdom, not to mention their child care capabilities, were thought of as being an incredibly great resource. So the whole family, three generations, sometimes four, lived in one house.
Now of course it was difficult for the newlyweds when they wanted privacy, and I heard some really hysterical stories, especially funny since it wasn't me who had to go down into the boiling hot house to find privacy when everybody else was sleeping on the roof because it was cooler, but stories like that were really common.
Guess what? It's coming to a theater near you! Or rather to a neighborhood near you, maybe even to your family and your house. We've seen a lot of that recently here in the United States, and I can't help but think that it really reminds me of some certain Third World countries that I visited.
Oh, we're not like Zimbabwe yet, but we're getting there; and some of it is really great. The so-called "nuclear family" was really an aberration, as far as I'm concerned; but of course I was born in Italy in 1942, and I lived in a society where money was scarce and big extended families lived together. Oh, and where people recycled because bottles were something you didn't throw away, and things that were broken got fixed instead of junked.
See, that's the real reason that it's all happening; a lack of money. And if you want to know one of the biggest reasons for the fact that money seems to be disappearing for most people, just go to this site:
http://costofwar.com/
and watch the numbers go up. that's money that is disappearing from our wallets, money that will never be applied to worthy causes, but that simply disappears. And the only people that it's enriching are people like the ex-CEO of Halliburton and others like him, people who I find so disgusting that if I was Pharaoh I would have their names removed from all public monuments and all records, and I would have them fed to crocodiles; but it's a long time since I was Pharaoh, and perhaps just as well.
And that's only the really overt price that we pay for waving a big stick around; there's so many hidden costs that they could easily be twice as much as that number that you see going up on the site. When you think that all of the industries that are making absolutely useless and already obsolete military products could be making products that bring us into the 21st century and increase both our productivity and our efficiency, you really have to wonder about our ability to see what is incredibly obvious; that we're beggaring ourselves while enriching people who are really unworthy of our money. And that the causes for the United States becoming a Third World country are staring us in the face, and we refuse to see it.
By the way, do you think of that we're making friends in the world by shooting people? Because if you do, and you actually think that we're "winning the war in Afghanistan" you probably believe in the tooth fairy as well.
Have a nice day, and work for peace. It's too late to save what we've already spent, but we can at least stop the flood of useless spending and useless killing.