As the current regime demolishes our functioning government to make way for dictatorship, they represent the culmination of the politics of selfishness carried out over more than half a century.
We hear a lot about the failure of civics education as if it's a new thing. It was already starting to fail in the 1970s as class sizes overwhelmed the size of school buildings and waves of Boomers were assembly-lined through the system to seek their fortunes after graduation. An awful lot that came at us just merged into a drone. This was on top of the sanitized history that minimized the sins and maximized the glory of each succeeding generation of rich white men who courageously got lots of poor people to work really hard for tiny shares of immense fortunes. In the case of slaves, that share was nil.
Those of us growing up in the 1960s learned in school that competition is what makes our country great. We also learned that any one of us could grow up to be anything we wanted to be. If you didn't happen to live near one of the stress points in the civil rights movement, you could even believe that this opportunity was being extended equally to all strivers of any color or creed.
I never cared if I shared a classroom with Black kids. I saw no reason why I shouldn't. However, I never really did until high school in the Miami, Florida, area. And I was oblivious to the unrest that had only just simmered down, even though my new schoolmates told me about schools being closed during riots. In Annapolis in the late 1960s, the high school saw some upheavals that led to broken windows and light fixtures, but I had been sent to a private school with exactly two Black students, both of them several grades ahead of me. They were well regarded in their class. One of them went on to become a doctor. He also punched out a classmate for using the n-word in casual conversation, while the group around him completely approved of the punitive fist in the face. It seemed downright post-racial, and it was only 1970 or '71. So let's get out there and be all we can be in this great land of opportunity.
The Vietnam War ended just in time to save my older brother from having to choose a branch of the service or a trip to Canada. The draft was suspended in January, 1973. I still had to register in 1974, but military service was no longer a ritual of young manhood unless you wanted it to be. Most of the guys I knew decided to skip it. Everyone I knew was focused on figuring out what they were going to do for a living. That's a universal theme in any generation emerging into adulthood, wherever their society places that threshold, but in the late 1970s the world still seemed hopeful and full of opportunity. It seemed safe enough to major in business and set your sights on earning your first million. You might even be able to buy a $12,000.00 luxury sports car. We would be fine as long as the Russkis didn't nuke us.
Vietnam veterans began to filter into the higher education system alongside kids who had been young enough to avoid the war. Somehow, they seemed to assimilate with the vapid disco 'droids and other happy materialists who had watched the war come and go on television. We who had not served just figured that they were picking up where they had left off, after a bad interlude of following orders from a misguided government that had now been brought to heel by mass public protests. Now c'mon and have fun! You're home safe! Push those dark thoughts aside!
Most of us are superficial. We deal with the immediate circumstances in front of us and extrapolate a vision of the future, filled with things that we do want and things that we don't want. "Don't borrow trouble," my father used to say. In a way it's good advice not to leap into someone else's problems or stir things up for your own entertainment. But the same philosophy enables you to look away from genuine injustice while you protect yourself in the interim, ignoring a situation that could conceivably slop back onto you at some point. Here was a man who made his living in part as a professional seafarer. What are preparations and drills but a form of borrowing trouble? A little borrowed trouble can serve as a vaccine against bigger trouble, or a quick, prophylactic dose of antibiotic before an infection gets out of control.
The trouble with aphorisms is that they don't differentiate. There are no universal words of wisdom that can never be interpreted in numerous ways. If the saying in question has an essence, we still lack the discernment to nail down which interpretation expresses it. Oh well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you can't fix it, use it as it is.
The 1970s was a period of rapid liberation. As a young dude in a male-dominated culture, I did not have the slightest awareness how new the emerging women's freedom was. To a young horn-dog, the area of greatest interest was that birth control pills had made a lot of women more willing to accept the endless invitations leveled at them to try it and see if they liked it. As it happened, many of them discovered that they did not, for various reasons. Horny dude culture did not then go, "oh, well that's all right then, sorry to have bothered you."
The student government in my senior year in high school was entirely female. I don't know how many of them went on to law school. One of them was majoring in architecture at U of F at the time I graduated and emerged into the welcoming job market of an incipient recession. Other female classmates definitely did pursue law and business degrees. We were all going places.
Whatever one chose to do, personal income was a driving principle. We also looked for job satisfaction, which helps if you are pursuing veterinary medicine, or nursing, for instance. And pure science careers didn't draw students in with the big bucks, but applied sciences sure did. And engineering. One psychology major I knew got hired by an insurance company as a claims adjuster. You can definitely use some psychology in the process of chiseling down someone's financial payout. And she got a company car!
Computers were still a joke and a futurist fantasy. No one seemed to realize how quickly the future would arrive, regardless of songs and stories harping on how fast time passes ("Well, the cat's in the cradle... etc.) Engineering types gravitated to the field to turn cutting edge technology into obsolete junk as quickly as possible. The aim was improved function, not just consumer enslavement. Consumer enslavement was a happy consequence. First you need the better machine to help you design the even better better machine.
Alongside the high tech future ran the path of the evolved hippies: organic farming, homesteading, hiding out from the government that we couldn't trust. Those philosophies lead both left and right. The "Jesus freaks" of the hippie years begat the evangelicals of today. You take care of your own. The world is doomed, but you don't have to be. On the other hand, sustainable practices are all that will assure us of future survival at all.
The theme of individual liberty ran throughout. And not just liberty but prosperity. You could choose to settle for less, but it was relative to the pursuit of excess that we already saw taking shape. Sales positions always recruited with the line "unlimited earning potential." In an era when $10,000 a year was just about enough to get started with an okay apartment and a beater car, as long as you got regular raises, the goal of "earning your age" set the standard for really making it. "Dude's pulling down 40 grand! Nice!" He's 33 and way ahead of schedule. But that didn't last long. Maybe if you count your age dating from when Homo Sapiens first emerged almost a million years ago you can settle for that figure.
Wealth and government were seen as separate, monolithic entities, not as the combined result of shared human effort. People might be rivals or marks or useful. Friends and loved ones are nice, but they should either bolster your own pursuit of income or at least be an affordable indulgence.
Even the concept of contributing to society was measured in dollars. If you have a good job -- i.e. one with a healthy paycheck, you're a good citizen and an asset to the community, even if you run a laboratory where animals are tortured to test mascara, or you direct a high-kill animal "shelter." Maybe you manufacture weapons, or cigarettes, or you're an environmental lawyer greenwashing the enterprises of an oil company. Or you work with your hands, on a fracking rig or building oil pipelines across wetlands. If the money's good, you're good. Just throw a little to charity.
If our society wasn't still driven by selfishness, pickup trucks would be a lot smaller and far less numerous. The discussion of social safety nets wouldn't center on "spending my tax dollars on other people's (insert basic need here)."
To earn a billion dollars you would have to make 20 million dollars per year for 50 years. We hear a lot about the rights of the wealthy to keep their "earnings," but absolutely nothing about their responsibilities after capturing so much of the money supply for their own uses. Sure, they have expenses, and many of those expenses involve paying people in various capacities to work for them. But a lot of money just breeds more money in a vacuum, feeding off of the perceived value of stocks, and transaction fees generated by trading them. Companies may employ people, but the stock market itself provides only thousands of jobs in an economy with millions of workers, and their employees don't produce anything.
Transparency laws require that financial services companies disclose their compensation. Trading is regulated although we're seeing more and more how insider trading is common and unpunished. Elected officials have been playing the market with inside information for decades. It's reached a crescendo now, with the executive branch up to the elbows in graft, and members of Congress still profiting off of companies that they regulate. Further proof that the best way to avoid criminal prosecution is to get elected to office. The second best way is simply to be obscenely rich -- too big to fail and too well-lawyered to jail. As Trump has proven, you don't even need good lawyers to do it, as long as you have enough of them to slow the system to a crawl. Go ahead and lose the case. Just take a long time doing it.
As far back as the 1980s one school of sleazebag life coaching laid out how you could go into debt and just keep moving it, moving it, moving it, until you could die and abandon it. As bankruptcy became less a suicide-worthy shame and more just another chess move in the business of life, you could shuck some of your burden that way, too. Hapless failures would set up payment plans that would never discharge the debt, and keep on living. Heck, the minimum payment on any credit card bill will never pay off the balance. As the population grew faster than the economy and environment could support it, harsher standards would have led to legions of starving people in the streets. And now we have that anyway.
While the Baby Boom pursued its indulgences, they started producing the next generation, instilling the same values, but dumping their progeny into a much more competitive landscape. And Gen X begat Millennials, and Millennials begat Gen Z... or something like that. I really dislike generational labels because they try to homogenize people while ignoring the variables that shape individuals within the group. You can analyze statistics, but you need all of the statistics for it to reflect reality. Who has time for that shit?
Indeed, time has been the critical factor helping the wealthy to grow more wealth and pull away from the working hordes. The people in power have taken care of themselves while looking down at the state of the world that they made, and using its crumbling state as their excuse to design private space programs and plan for the extermination of millions because automated production lines and AI data centers don't need them. The working classes are too busy staying housed and fed to critically analyze the political information hosing them down.
Those private rockets don't stay up for long, though. The fantasy that the tech bros have, that they will fly off into space and find new worlds to consume and destroy is not supported by their current success rate. Using far more primitive technology, the United States government put multiple craft onto the moon more than half a century ago. It was a time of much higher top tax brackets, and much lower CEO compensation.
John F. Kennedy ushered in the 1960s saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." It was a call to civic responsibility. By the mid 1970s, the citizens had decided, "yeah, fck that! The moon was cool and all, but that Vietnam thing was bullshit. We'd rather get rich and have fun." Failing the rich part, we'll settle for the fun. What got progressively buried was the idea that citizen government has a higher purpose. The government we had seemed big enough to take care of itself. We could sneer at it and vote for politicians who said that they would save us from it, but it would always be there, taking care of...business. And that's the problem. It has taken care of business ("the business of America is business") as separate from humanity. Labor is a necessary evil, a cost to be controlled. Calvin Coolidge's original statement from which the popular misquote is distilled was more detailed and nuanced, but it still supported the idea that America is a nation of business people, "profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world."
My high school guidance counselor in 1974 told me "success is money!" Perhaps he was a little bitter over his own life choices, but at least he was trying to save me from wasting my life in pursuit of illusory satisfactions. Get rich or die trying.
The only place where taking better care of the planet and each other might get the smallest toehold in Coolidge's summation is in the word "prospering." Are you "prospering" in a fortified luxury community with sprawling slums for miles outside its gates, under a smog-filled sky, with a view of the lifeless, multicolored chemical stew that used to be the ocean? Some would say that since such a scene is inevitable, it's far better to be in the fort than the slums.
You bet your life on the course you choose when you are young. Then you bet your children's lives that they will find a path through the world that you prepared for them. The workers have numbers, and immense power if we act together. But we are each entitled to our opinion about the help and harm that we spread, and to whom we spread them. That's the democracy part of our republic. That's the cumulative effect of our lifestyles.
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