Opinion/Editorial
A BUILDING RAGE
“He who has no target, hits same,” is an old Chinese proverb. It applies to such things as shooting, game playing, and life itself. We are currently living inside an American culture that has had every worthwhile target removed from its visual cortex so that aimlessness, lack of motivation, and subsistence survival will occupy all thinking and direction. And yes, it is that serious a problem. Once almost all vehicles for open and mass communication were taken over and understood by corporate America, the redirection of almost all efforts became a part of the fabric of our country’s long-term mission. That mission has deliberately been redefined as the creation and building of wealth for a very few.
This mission is carefully hidden away, stated only by a few ‘wild-eyed’ liberals, and given about as much real credence as UFOs. As our American culture developed, there was great stock put into thinking about majestic long-term goals while most of the people worked to implement these ideas. One person cannot launch a rocket into space or lay down a highway. Many people still living today remember the nation’s space program and the wonderfully participative cultural endeavor it was. Many still recall the wonders of spreading electricity to everyone by the building of massive dams across the nation. The interstate highway program was another on this massive scale. Before memory, but well documented in history were programs to make homeownership available to everyone and to put a car in every garage of those millions of homes. The installation of cross-country railroad tracks preceded this grand national endeavor.
The American culture triumphed to the point where it soon became the dominant society on the planet. Those programs are gone, and they are not being replaced. We live in a culture that has come to accept that going nowhere and doing nothing together is as valuable as any joint effort. This belief system has been systematically put into place by a movement that has at its very heart a deep and deadly selfish intent. A great part of the effort to instill and maintain this profoundly new culture of ennui has been directed toward hiding that there is no intent to make this happen at all. Very subtly, and with the assistance of religious orders of some magnitude, a culture that revered technology has come to despise or ignore it, while at the same time, enjoying some of the still surviving benefits of its toys (think about being on the 15th iteration of the iPhone, which so many years later still only does what it was originally designed to do).
Science is no longer seen as being how we come to know what is real and what is not, what will work and what will not, what has been tried and been successful before and what has not. Science today is something to be put up against ‘belief systems’ like creationism, the teachings of the Bible, or the Koran.
We know better. We have history to show us that our current path is culturally suicidal if we continue to stay on this course. But will we read history anymore? Will we recognize what it is? We have the movie Lincoln, which the public thinks is history. The movie, portraying Lincoln to be a better friend to blacks than Martin Luther King, failed to mention that Lincoln wanted to send the blacks back to Africa! Ergo, that movie is not true. Almost none of what happened in the movie happened in real life, but that is not how it is seen. Zero Dark Thirty is a travesty of an assembled jumble of fiction made to look like history. If we cannot tell the difference between these false representations and the real thing then we are doomed to continue to have nothing to aspire to except the creation of wealth.
We do not have an expressed plan to connect every city in America by high-speed rail. We do not have this plan on purpose. We do not have a real space program anymore, just this seemingly semi-private program that can’t seem to get us back to the moon, no matter how many billions are spent.
This was done on purpose. We do not have to make a giant effort to give every home in America high-speed Internet for free. Those places are called Korea and Taiwan. Fusion has been discovered and proven to work, and quickly forgotten about Our televisions merely rage away our days telling us that we must lower taxes and spend less. We must pay the bills. We must endeavor to persevere. All of us, as Americans, owe it to the future to hate this attitude. We must break out and come to believe that there is something worth living for other than getting by so we can enrichment of a very few.
