Our 21st Century Social Contract

The Myth of “Us” Versus “Them”…

As an increasing number of Amerikans come to realize that something is fundamentally wrong with the Amerikan status quo, we unfortunately prefer to project rather than accept blame for the situation. We attempt to blame our political and economic representatives for both the causes and the effects associated with the litany of economic and environmental problems that currently confront us.

This erroneous line of reasoning creates the mistaken impression that, we, the Amerikan public, are the innocent victims of dysfunctional policies and practices being imposed on us by external forces beyond our control—it’s “them”, not “us”. Unfortunately, this convenient but misguided junkie-logic serves only to obscure the real cause associated with Amerika’s pressing economic and environmental problems, and to totally undermine effective solutions.

It is essential that we, as Amerikans, understand that our political and economic representatives are not responsible for the fact that we continue to rush headlong toward our own demise; that we, as individual Amerikans, are solely responsible for our current dilemma. Our political and economic representatives are merely our “elected” agents, acting on our behalf—we elect our political representatives with votes and we elect our economic representatives with dollars.

In truth, our political and economic representatives are doing exactly what we, the Amerikan public, have elected them to do—they are attempting, at any cost, to maintain the Amerikan Culture, a distorted “reality” within which we can perpetuate our addiction to excessive consumption and our inflated lifestyles.

Whether it involves incurring irreparable debt, waging wars to ensure steady oil and natural gas supplies, selling our sovereignty to foreign interests, or using our planet as a garbage dump, our political and economic representatives continuously attempt to defy the laws of nature and economics on our behalf—as we do individually—in order to “buy us our next fix”.

What we have here is a symbiotic relationship between an oblivious, addicted Amerikan public and our political and economic representatives, to whom we have ascribed the privileged status of “leaders”. We, as Amerikans, have willingly abdicated total responsibility for our very existence at the societal level to our “leaders”, in exchange for “perpetual entitlement” to our inflated lifestyles at the individual level.

The unspoken social contract between the Amerikan public and our political and economic representatives: “We won’t ask questions about how you make it happen—any type of rule violation, hypocrisy, duplicity, hidden agenda, manipulation, or international aggression is fine—just don’t jeopardize our ‘right’ to live beyond our means. If you can’t, won’t, or claim not to be able to ‘guarantee’ that ‘right’, you are out…”

Only when “we” choose to terminate our addiction to excessive consumption and live sustainably within our means at the individual level, will we elect political and economic representatives who will take commensurate action at the societal level.

We are what we elect; we elect what we are…

(See www.wakeupamerika.com for proposed solutions; I welcome yours as well.)