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but until that day arrives, it will be interesting hard times.
While I do believe we are on the wind down, due to a great many issues, mostly to do with colossal ignorance, it will take a long time for it to come to a complete stop.
I don't believe it will be a Soviet Union type collapse, as Dimitri Orlov describes. While the Soviet collapse had a massive effect on the Warsaw pact countries and their various satellites, it had very little effect upon the western nations and their NATO allies.
The US economy is so huge and so all encompassing, that it will be virtually impossible for a single nation in the world not to feel the effect in one way shape or form.
To paraphrase George Castanza, "we will be like an old man getting slowly into a hot bath". It's to the worlds benefit that we don't have a sudden collapse. They don't want to go down with us.
So to all of us who are paying attention, the various supports and props that are paraded out as "fixes" to this that or the other are merely there to delay the inevitable.
Can collapse be avoided if already set into motion? Maybe, but that is a very big maybe. What needs to be done is an massive investment into retrofitting society for a new reality. A society that has to do with a lot less. Not less productivity, not less happiness, just less of everything across the board.
Our over indulgence is what got us here. We have %5 of the population and use 25% of the earths resources.
And now when you have China and India wanting a similar (not the same) standard of living we enjoy, those additional resources have to come from somewhere. And when dealing with finite resources, something has to give.
There is a war going on. No, not the ones we know too well about. The war is one of economics. While China's economy is dwarfed by ours and certainly doesn't have the various safeguards that we enjoy, it still is growing at a rapid pace while ours is just about all but still.
We are losing that war. How? By shipping our industry oversees. By selling out the American public to the lowest bidder.
Once upon a time, the US economy and lifestyle was the envy of the world. Not because we bought crap and wasted everything, but because we had peace from coast to coast. People could earn a decent living and provide for their families. Could send their kids to college.
My dad worked for the Dept of Sanitation in NYC. My mom didn't work. He provided for our family and able to put 4 kids through college, retire very nicely, own a small cottage on a lake in Canada and leave my mom a nice tidy sum of money when he passed away.
Today? That is a fantasy written from whole cloth.
Single income household? Provide college education for your kids without loans? Own an additional house on a lake? Who are you? Rich?
Hell, no, my dad was a blue collar worker. A mechanic.
We have fallen so far and so deep down the republican hole of rhetoric in this nation, that what once was the norm is now looked upon as crazy impossible.
My dad had a great union job. He got the benefits of such from people like him who protested and demanded that the City of NYC treat its workers right. He also benefited from the millions of others who fought and died and protested for those same rights before him.
But what has the last 30 years brought us? We are told that Unions are evil. The majority of Americans believe the complete falsehood that "all unions are crooked", "all unions take money from you", etc.
Sadly, no one in this nation ever checks the source anymore, they take this statements at face value because this lie been pounded into their heads so relentlessly by the few corporations that control everything that they believe nothing else.
The slow and deliberate spiral of this nation is due to something very simple yet has incredible significance.
What is that one thing? The total and complete disregard for the people of this nation. Period.
Once we became labeled "consumers" we lost everything that went with being a citizen. The slow and deliberate whittling away of our rights.
They tell us to go "shopping" in times of despair as if we were some stereotyped 1950's tv housewife. How insulting is that? Not just to women, but to everyone!
We are told that government will solve the problems of security, but out of the same mouth we are told that government is the problem.
We tortured in the name of freedom but are able capture OBL without raising a hand to anyone for information.
We choose to zone out and tune into nightly propaganda to tell us the things we want to hear, not the things we need to know.
We are sliding down. A few of us are trying to snag a branch, a rock or an exposed root on the way down, but sadly, the further we descend, the slippery it gets.
It will be a long slide, it will take a long time, but not like Rome, which took about 300 years (depending on which historian you read). No, for the US, due to globalization, it will take about 100 years to complete.
All along the way, we will continue to give up more and more for our "safety", while budgets for defense will go up and programs for the poor go down. All in the name of "freedom and safety".
We are dying a death by 1000 cuts. Each cut, we bleed just a little bit. We shrug it off, but before you know it, we will have been bled dry.
Will we stand up to this madness? Will we say no more? Will we have had enough when we are scraping for potatoes to get us through another winter?
People will do a lot. Humans are amazing creatures. From the civilians at Leningrad who ate the glue on book bindings to live, to the people of the dust bowl who ate nothing but beens month after month to survive, to the Cambodians who lived through pol pot by drinking cows blood, we will go on.
However, a nation that doesn't listen to it's people can not survive.
It's really that simple.
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