Going well, eh? Just heard on the Colbert Report tonight that there are 42 million Americans living below the poverty line.
Yes, Colbert is a satirical show, but this was no satire. Just a cold fact.
And I heard years ago that Americans real income hasn’t risen in 10 years – that is, the purchasing power of their incomes has been stationary or falling for the last ten years – more than that now.
They’ve got a system that allowed a financial meltdown that caused virtually nothing to happen to us at all. Which makes it easy for us to think nothing happened.
In a world overloaded with news and tv real-life dramas it is easy for that fact to make no impression to mean nothing to us and that’s about what happened.
But in fact something did happen that could have put the world into a tailspin – closing down trade across the world, closing down factories, shops, transport companies… closing down banks, building societies – we saw that… all kinds of things..
It nearly put a stop to our world. That’s what it nearly did.
And apparently the USA has done nothing to prevent a repeat of it.
But what it has done is go deeper and deeper into debt.
Check the situation and think about it…. tell me what you think, because I don’t know what to think but it all looks like sheer insanity to me……
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
And now I just saw the Gruen Transfer ad about Boat People and – yep, let them in.
Or at the very least humanise them. I’ve been wondering what’s going on. I listen to radio national all the time and think of it as probably the greatest news/current affairs/social commentary broadcast in the world – yet I was noticing that after all this time and all the various mentions I’ve heard on RN about boat people I still know nothing at all about any particular ‘boat people’.
Like not one name. Not one story. About a human individual.
I’ve heard the numbers that demonstrate our fear/phobia is ridiculous.
We have a mere trickle coming here – a trickle of refugees – but even of that trickle the boat people are much, much a minority. Mainly they come by air and simply overstay visa or whatever.
I didn’t need to hear any numbers (or know any human stories in the particular) to know that the world is full of agony and oppression and poverty and illness and cruelty and hopelessness and that we are living in a relative land of milk and honey, a paradise.
Because like so many others I’ve been there and seen it.
Thousands (millions?) of us have. And come back disquieted. Looking at our own homes with fresh eyes, fresh attitudes. Lamenting what a sad, greedy, stupid, colourless, hopeless mob we appear to be. Clearly seeing the difference between ourselves and those colourful, cheerful happy crowds of people in the third world with nothing but each other.
I’ve know because of this for years that there’s a basic unfairness in the world and we are in receipt of the better half of the bargain.
We have it all. We have so much and they have so little and there’s so many of them we know we can’t save them all. So we cower down and hide, keep our heads below the parapet, try to keep them away, try to not see them… the rest of the world…
🙂 that’s how it is