What in the Hell Happened?
I was sold a bill of goods
Oh, how I remember 3rd grade. I would sit in the corner with the World Book encyclopaedia, looking at the artists’ impressions of life in the year 2000, the way a teenage boy used to look at the underwear section of the Sears catalog (hey, Catholic kids had limited choices).
I can still recall the image of the quintessential white middle-class family of four, all dressed for Sunday-go-to-meetin’, grinning like Cheshire cats, and Father piloting the aircar over an urban landscape, as the family swooped out to the country for a Sunday glide.
I bought into the old black-and-white TeeVee ads of Mother with her string of pearls, up to her gizzard in shiny stainless-steel appliances doing all the drudge work for her, so she’d have more time to spend whipping up gourmet meals for the clan out of the Helen Corbett Bible.
Meantime, little Johnny and Jane, all freshly groomed and perfectly behaved, would greet Father as he emerged from his IBM Home Office of the Future, after a hard four-hour day of vidding and teletexting. They’d offer Father his pipe and slippers, and rub his burdened shoulders, making sure the sole bread-winner of the house was relaxed and revived.
Yes, my impressionable little mind bought all that crap - the cookie-cutter house in Levitttown, the pastel angularity of hideous interior design, the nuclear duck-and-cover blandness of family life. I swallowed the hook, line and sinker of grateful kids who honored their progenitors and strove for excellence, if not global superiority.
Instead, what we got was family “courts” salivating over denuding Father, and leaving him broken and bereft of dignity. We got Mother who couldn’t burn water - if she ever tried - and who washed the whites with the colors in hot water with generic laundro-chem, if she used soap at all. We got narcissistic biscuit-grabbers who couldn’t muster two-syllable words and wouldn’t know gratitude if it bit them in the face. We got cracker-box palaces that championed functionality over aesthetics, and offered the barest living space as “minimalist” design.
And where are the damned flying cars?! Musk can’t even get auto-drive to work without killing pedestrians, much less go vertical with it.
We’ve all bought into the Techno-Utopia. It’s a myth at best, and an ugly farce at worst. Hell, even myths are based on some kind of reality, so using that word gives credit where none is due.
We assumed that there was actually someone in the wheelhouse of this Titanic society. We assumed that someone would actually build that shiny future we were entitled to. We assumed that someone was watching out for our best interests so we could suck alche-brew in front of the TeeVee and not be bothered with actually achieving anything. We assumed that consuming stuff would bring happiness.
We assumed wrongly.
We’re not entirely to blame. We were trained to consume. We were trained to accept males as nurturers and females as leaders. We were trained to think children absorbed culture without guidance or discipline. We were trained that technology was an answer to anything, much less an ever-rising lifestyle. We were trained to think that someone…anyone (but us)…would provide us with a life of leisure pursuits and endless vacations.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
We are a obsolete managerial class that delegated our responsibilities to a bunch of manufactured dreams of gleaming sterility. It was our responsibility to consume our idyllic future, and we couldn’t be bothered to sustain even that much effort. We preferred to phone in from the beach and hope for the best, and it imploded under our lawn chairs.
We gave up all our freedom so we wouldn’t be inconvenienced with reality. We fought for the right to dope up, so the pain of incarceration didn’t hurt so much. We created a monstrous industry to feed us pills so we couldn’t remember why we feel so bad. We choked ourselves on pleasure to avoid feeling the lacerations of servitude.
Sure, we can divert a bit of the blame on the slippery shadows that sold us a bill of goods, but we bought it and didn’t check the contents until it was far too late. We could shift a little blame onto the grandparents for allowing encroachments on our liberty. We could blame our parents for building the empirical behemoth that is crushing the life out of the world. Ultimately, however, it is us who didn’t stop the run-away train when we had the chance. We were far too busy milking Reaganomics and we thought we were all Michael Milken moving paper around and calling it wealth.
We were the ones who allowed the evil Shrub crime family to steal our birthright in the name of safety, and give us a Woke-up call in its place.
Can we fix it? At this point I seriously doubt it. The bastards are determined to collapse the entire world to get their way. The best we can do is thwart their evil plans and make sure we control the outcome.
We are the last great hope for humanity. If we fail, there will likely never be anything resembling freedom for our species, ever again. We have produced a generation of self-indulgent, privileged little darlings who couldn’t survive a day without the gilded cage we built.
We are it. We are the deciding factor. If we don’t fight now - throwing our sabot in the gears of “progress - there will be no one left who can even comprehend what we have lost, much less fight to get it back.
Make every action, every decision count. Carpe diem!
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I don't believe it can be fixed either. In fact it needs to collapse as it's all based and built on lies and deception. It cannot be fixed. Only replaced. The problem is a severe lack of conscious awareness in the masses. The few need the help of the many to rule the many. Until the masses gain enough conscious awareness, they'll fall into the same old traps. The ruling class doesn't have to call an audible at the line of scrimmage because most people will just fall for the same old plays.
the Boomer Lament!
we never got to "meet George Jetson"
Sigh.