Entitlement whores want life guarantees

Joe,

Like you've mentioned before, the central theme of American life seems to revolve around security. The search for security, entertainment, comfort and convenience seem to explain almost everything that can be seen in the states these days.

I would have to say that many people, if they can, turn themselves into entitlement whores in order to get security. They get the degree or the training so they can get the sinecure, the guaranteed position. They get the guaranteed position not because of their ability to perform, but because of their "qualifications". Paper is trusted, but not people.

Almost everything in the states seems to revolve around the sinecure, the search for the guaranteed position. The educational system, patterns of consumption, colleges, relationships. All are afraid that they will backslide into the ranks of the insecure, those without a sinecure. So they do morally indefensible jobs -- like supporting the war machine -- pay their (mostly) war taxes, do jobs they hate, work for bosses who couldn't manage a slumber party properly.

Many people think George Bush is a good manager because they've worked for incompetent managers their whole adult life. They honestly can't tell the difference between competence and incompetence. They think belief and bravado equates to competency.

Our glorious government promises us "security" from all those nasties overseas -- so we write them a blank check, give them the permission to beat the tar out of whoever they please.

I don't think people are necessarily bad, mostly just ignorant, and so much embalmed in security and the quest for security that everything they do and think is filtered through that lens.

And they follow blindly anybody who seems to offer them security.

Brent
Oregon

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Dear Brent,

You've put the material aspect of American life about as succinctly as it can be done.

Yet, underneath it all is the American denial of a moral and spiritual dimension to life. While this denial is by no means unique to America (most humans prefer goods to an inner life), our inability to even experience insight, combined our national hallucination of exceptionalism and the capitalist Gordian knot of militarism, meaningless technology, financial exploitation and extreme dependency upon ecological destruction, make the consequences of our moral emptiness the largest global problem at hand, at least until China gets up enough steam to contribute even more to the coming global collapse.

Bleak as all that may be, I am witnessing within the next generation the emergence of a stunning number of young people who reject all that. Hell, even the Christian right has been creating many such young people, but as defectors. Right now truly dissident and moral youth of the next generation seem to be spread thinly, and what little cohesion they have appears to be over the net -- but they've sure as hell got the picture and are not afraid of morality or the spirit either.

I think they will emerge as the leaders of what remains, after the ultimate collapse goes down. Especially considering that there will not be enough resources left for them to recreate the same folly as my generation and my parent's generation did. It's gonna be hard to entertain much materialistic hubris when living in a rented storage unit along the East River, waiting for the local vendor to deliver your daily gallon of potable water from his wheelbarrow load of plastic jugs recycled from the landfill. It's already happening for tens millions and is spreading, not receding, on this planet. We can continue to construct our gulag of goods and pretend it's Winthrop's promised "City in the Hill." But not forever.

Out of suffering comes moral and spiritual understanding. And we'll get our crack at it too. All civilizations fall. Hell, some of the most miserable places in the Middle East once ruled the world for centuries at a time. If there was such a thing as true security, or the ability to protect security through brute power, they'd still be ruling their world.

In art and labor,

Joe