03-12-2020, 11:52 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-13-2020, 08:05 AM by beechnut79.)
(03-12-2020, 04:14 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Homelessness is damaging. The homeless are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. They are at particular risk from meteorological hazards.
Homeless youth are often dragooned into the sex trade. You do not want to be in that business; it is not good for a happy life. The suicide rate is astronomical in the pornography business, so just think of how tough life could be for a street hooker. Prostitutes are the most common prey for serial killers, and for some it is only a matter of time.
Many of the homeless have troubles far worse than a lack of housing, including mental illness and addiction. Many are violent people. When families get consigned to it, the absence of walls makes raising a child extremely difficult. Privacy works two ways -- in protecting intimacy and protecting children from things inappropriate for them.
We have gone nearly as far as we can with a paradigm that says that economic inequality and brutal management create wealth. Consequences include poverty and economic insecurity. The only way for things to get worse is if we resort to fascist or Stalinist labor camps even more destructive of the human spirit as well as of the precious virtue of liberty. We are in a saecular Crisis, one that requires basic changes in institutions if only to prevent a domestic apocalypse. We have enough wealth and productivity with which to solve all human needs.
We need to revitalize "flyover country" so that people think twice about leaving Cleveland for Los Angeles on the knowledge that Los Angeles at least has milder winters. Maybe if people weren't so broke in "flyover country"...
Life without dignity? That is how we rightly treat criminals as a deterrent to dealing drugs, doing armed robberies, and starting bar brawls. But such can also be a consequence of an economic ideology whose fundamental underpinning is an ethos asserting that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it creates, enhances, or enforces class privilege for the elites of ownership and administration.
Should I get the now-unlikely opportunity to see castles and palaces of central Europe, I will remind myself of the Eszterhazy family (Hungarian-Viennese aristocracy) so rich that they could keep the most pivotal composer of Western musical history (Franz Josef Haydn) as a retainer. OK, so we have a great volume excellent music as a legacy... but how was life for the peasants? A feudal lord taking all the surplus above a starvation level could, if he had enough peasants under him, could live in a way that a more modern Rothschild or Rockefeller can. At least Rothschild financing relies upon the principle that the deal must be good for the borrower, and the oil companies that derive from John Davison Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company seem to pay well enough.
Much is wrong in America, and it is going to take solutions not of a political nature to solve some of those. Solid families will themselves solve many problems better than any welfare programs. Changing the tax laws to favor small business instead of vertically-integrated, bureaucratized behemoths will make prosperity more widespread due to the dispersal of economic and administrative power. Small business? What could better suit and reward the current and potential workaholics that we now have?
Now for my paragraph by paragraph response:
P1: Very self explanatory. No real response needed.
P2: May really be only a matter of time before the next Jack the Ripper or Gary Ridgway emerges. The latter is the infamous Green River killer for those not familiar with the name. He was responsible for more murders than was the much better known Ted Bundy, the reason probably being that Bundy selected mainstream college girls who are higher up the societal totem pole.
P3: The fact that families have been sucked into the homeless whirlpool is especially damning. The nature of the modern era’s job and housing markets is also a significant factor as well as the trend toward more isolation among the society at large, ironically brought on in part by what is often referred to as social media.
P4: Opening sentence: the brainwashing seems to be continue. Another unfortunatel byproduct is the increasing desire along with difficulty in creating some alone time, which I began to touch on in my response to P3. There is and has been for quite some time an increasing need to just get away from it all. The unfortunate byproduct of this is a much worse societal malaise than that which sacked the Carter presidency four decades ago. Not mentioned here buy certainly making the current malaise worse is how much you have to guard against the urge to say something impulsively, which will certainly get you that alone time, but not in the way you want and will regret it later on.
P5: Agreed for the most part. A microcosm in one state is Pennsylvania, which has often been described as Philadelphia on the east, Pittsburgh on the west and Alabama in the middle. The national translation is for the most part self-explanatory with the exception of the area around Chicago.
P6: Proof that we have been in Gilded Age II for the better part of four decades. Not really sure if increases in crime are co-related.
P7: Illustrates the seedlings of what could erupt into modern day Bastille-like rebellion. But I don’t believe that today’s society would have the collective spirit with which to pull it off. A plot to burn down Wall Street and/or some big corporate behemoth? Might the corona virus accomplish this without any bloodshed? (Do not advocate such actions; just demonstrating that there could be sufficient anger bubbling under the surface).
P8: No juice here. Right number, wrong alpha character. Makes a lot of sense. Could it be that we could yet have a breakup of today’s corporate trusts like the one admistered by TR around the turn of the previous century? Could it also be that the reason big business came to dominate pretty much every industry is that they brainwashed the public into believing that they could do it all better? While it might be nice, I do tend to be doubtful that we could ever return to the days of mom and pop shops on Main Street. Much has been made of the decades long trend toward interests of Main Street being eclipsed by those of Wall Street. The reason a mom and pop revival is unlikely is because they usually can’t offer the level of convenience that today’s society demands. Haven’t you all noticed that each generation seems to demand more convenience than did the previous owner one—from the advent of 7-11 and similar stores to home delivery of food.