With All Due Respect, You Don't Get It...

A message to all Amerikan social activists and concerned citizens…

While I applaud your intentions in attempting to resolve your targeted economic or environmental problem—burgeoning federal deficits/debt, our dependence on oil, foreign ownership, global warming, poverty—you are wasting your time and resources. The problem that you are addressing is merely a derivative or by-product of a more fundamental Amerikan problem, our addiction to excessive consumption—living beyond our means in order to perpetuate our inflated lifestyles. You cannot possibly resolve your targeted problem unless and until we first terminate our addiction to excessive consumption.

Why?

As long as we remain junkies, addicted to excessive consumption and our resulting inflated lifestyles, we will find ways to score—that is, we will continue to commit economic and environmental indiscretions in order to live beyond our means. And, we will always be able to commit economic and environmental indiscretions at a much greater rate than the rate at which they can be remedied by social activists and concerned citizens.

The reality is that all attempts to resolve our economic and environmental problems, in the absence of first terminating our addiction to excessive consumption, are of no permanent consequence and are a waste of time and resources. These efforts are tantamount to issuing buckets and mops to clean up the mess resulting from a water main break, while neglecting to first close the valve.

Compounding the futility associated with these current problem solving efforts is the fact that the fragmented and disjointed agendas endorsed by today’s social activists and concerned citizens—thousands of competing causes with competing messages—send conflicting and confusing messages to the Amerikan public. The result is apathy or even resistance to “social causes” by mainstream Amerika, who are simply overwhelmed by information overload.

Today’s fragmented economic and environmental problem solving efforts, which target currently insoluble problems, must be re-channeled into a single, focused, well-orchestrated effort that targets the underlying cause associated with all of our pressing economic and environmental problems—our addiction to excessive consumption. We must eradicate the source before we can effectively resolve the derivatives, which will require a concerted effort on the part of all Amerikans.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Henry David Thoreau

(Please see www.wakeupamerika.com for details.)

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.)