Occupation forces have gone into hibernation in many places as the authorities have moved in to shut down their encampments. But the melody should linger on. Economic disparity certainly will.
In an effort to do our part, Prophets of Boom will feature two kinds of posts over the coming months. The first stream will be drawn from a book manuscript written a decade ago but unpublished because nobody was ready to acknowledge the threat posed to individual and collective sovereignty by mounting debt loads. Entitled "
Futurehype", each post in the series will describe how North Americans were lulled into thinking that the honeypot of postwar prosperity was bottomless.
There will be stories of naiveté, of greed and of gullibility, to be sure.
American Greed wasn’t just discovered to explain the credit crash of 2008.
More to the point, there will be accounts of how faith in technology and the pipeline of mass communications overheated expectations.
In a real way we allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by our own ingenuity.
In the process, we lost sight of our core values. That, basically, is how we let ourselves get in so deep.
The second stream of posts in this blog will be based on our search for answers out of the current economic de-stabilization.
In this search we will be asking whether the
Conversation of a Generation is beginning to take shape.
Is there anything happening out there to give us hope that the most innovative and productive society in history can work its way out of this slump?
What are people proposing to do differently?
This series will not be a simplistic critique of capitalism run amok.
Rather, it will be an exploration of ways to shape our collective experience for the common good.
Has Occupy Wall Street really signalled the start of something big?
Or are we programmed to sleepwalk into a new Dark Ages?
Along the way, readers will be urged to look for solutions themselves and tell the rest of us what they have found out.
We will be … and we will post our findings as they emerge.
2 comments:
When did you last hear this sage advice: 'If you can't afford it, don't buy it'? Or this: 'If you want something, start saving money to buy it.' At the risk of sounding hopelessly out of touch, seems to me those are solid words of advice. As for me, the last time I heard those words they were coming out of my father's mouth some fifty years ago when I was desperate to buy my first car (a 1938 Chevrolet four-door sedan which the owner would gladly sell me for $200). As you might guess, my father refused me the loan. I can still remember how angry I was.
Somewhere along the line - perhaps the 1950s, certainly the 1960s - we as a society had pretty well chosen to ignore our parents' sage advice, heeding instead the advice of salesmen of all stripes who said: 'Why wait? If you want it, buy it. Can't afford it? Not to worry, just sign right here.'
I think you're quite right. A 'simplistic critique of capitalism run amok' is not what is needed here.
What we need here is a mirror.
And the courage to look into it.
The economy of the 30's enveloped those of us borne in those days of frugality. If you don't have the money you can't afford it, or as a late friend of mine would say, if you have to ask the price you can't afford it!
The rich/poor divide will continue to spread, as it has for centuries. It is impossible to convince some people to refrain from spending what they simply don't have. Plastic allows it . Go for it.
My first car (50%) was $100 and that was 12X my last (walking) lawnmower. So times change, but I had the cash for the car and for the lawnmower.
OWS are a sixties group. Right?
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