Views from Outside the Box

LIFE IS DIFFERENT NOW

I am so fortunate to have grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. There was still a real world out there.

Kids played outside, with each other, instead of being immersed in video games or TV or cell phones. The world was not yet dominated by corporations and national chain stores. There was individuality and originality. Songs had no “method”. Music all sounded different. TV was only on a few hours a day and there were only three channels.

Most people had a job and a decent income that could help raise a family. You were most likely assured of a lifetime job with a company and a reasonable, secure retirement after putting in your 20 years.

There was racism. Plenty of it, but we lived in a nation then that was locked in a struggle to grant equal right to minorities and women….to right the wrongs of an otherwise great nation. There was a sincere sense of hope and direction.

The 80s ended all that.

Since Ronald Reagan, our country has been in rapid decline. We have lost our neighborhoods. We lost our communities. Mom and Pop businesses have been devoured by big business. Jobs were traded for profits. Benefits were traded for profits. Security was traded for profits. Job loyalty was traded for profits. Bigotry, intolerance, national arrogance and bullying reared it’s ugly head once again under the facade of “American Exceptionalism”…brought on by a B-actor cowboy on horseback who played on the fears of a declining white America.

The Fascists have turned everyone against everyone else, in an attempt to divert our attention from their actions to completely and totally take control of everything we have. People retreat into their own causes, their own small communities and their own personal cyber world, building walls to protect what little they have left. Meanwhile, your security, dignity and hopes wither like a house plant in the corner that has been neglected.

The individuality of our cities has been replaced with cloned national companies. Identical shopping malls are planted in every community. Small business has been smothered. Community identities have been smashed and replaced with national models.

The big-business propaganda will blame it on “government regulations”, but fail to tell you that “Big Business” has written almost all of the laws since 1980 by the use of high paid lobbyists in Washington DC to further their own interests. The people are no longer represented. Money is now the thing that determines our future, with all profits going to the top, with NO "trickle down"..while they continue to poison our food, pollute our cities, our air, our water and our lives in the name of Shareholder profits.

Wars are no longer fought for Freedom, but for Corporate Interests abroad. Soldiers are used and then thrown away, no longer able to depend on a grateful nation, but discarded by ungrateful oligarchs.

We have an entire generation that has been raised in a cyber world, devoid of personal contact, unstructured by knowledge of history and how to control their government and lacking perspective and compassion for their fellow man.

It is now nothing more than utter survival. A total sense of self-identity with little regard for what is moral and right. The vision of the future is reduced to personal gain. Acceptance of evil is now considered the norm....just the other side of life. People avoid it by ignoring it....living in denial until it towers over their own tightly woven lives.

Truly a very different world than the one I grew up in.

Happy New Year…….I guess.