imminent

Where will I be when the world around me crumbles? It’s only a matter of time before our way of life shatters around us. We can’t sustain it much longer. I don’t know what the breaking point is, but it can’t be far off. The politicians allow the corporations to run mostly everything. Conglomeration is the norm and becoming even more common. There is no end to the power these corporations feel entitled to.

Corporations exploit any resource and all of their labor in order to turn an ever-higher profit. The economy looks good from the outside in the form of high margins and big gains, but how long will the luster of exploitation last? Those that can stand up to them remain complacent and unaffected. They ignore what’s going around them or have been failed by the system in being too ignorant to understand it. The pursuit of profit should never govern moral decisions.

Upper and lower classes are separating. There used to be a vibrant middle class on which the elite balanced. Now they have eaten away at that middle class, making more and more of them working poor. How will they keep from falling? The rich are becoming richer with the help of to government, all the while the poor fall farther into poverty behind the turned shoulder of that same government. In the name of efficiency and capitalism, the poor are being bled to death.

Our health is worse than ever. We are getting cancer, heart disease, and any number of lifestyle-related illnesses in larger numbers. Vast swatches of this country will live a short life than their foreign counterparts, while waving the flag of the best country on earth. Millions of insured citizens are pushed into crushing debt while millions of others are denied because of profit-cutting “preexisting conditions.” Profit squeezed from the sick to pad the wallets of the powerful.

The government, voted to represent the people, is ignoring the popular opinions of their constituents in favor of corporate interests. The parties bicker and attack each other while generating suffocating policies. We are falling behind in every category of import, including education, health, finances, and foreign policy. The majority of an annual budget goes to an overextended military in unwelcoming lands defending an unpopular empire.

Across the globe we’re seen as consuming exponentially more than anyone else, invading a country for their lucrative resources, and being a population of ignorant racists. Our motives for preemptive war were unjust and illegal. Our corporations rape the lands of the less powerful and if any of them stand up our government pressures them until they concede to the corporate giants.

Corporations and the government have paid millions and pushed hard against the almost indisputable science of the pending global catastrophe. They have delayed our advances and halted legislation while putting us decades behind where we should be. Millions will die when the earth loses it’s incredible ability to heal itself. We will pass the breaking point and the population will grow beyond our crop yields and economies will fail.

The fight to find profit in the global disaster is sparking a new wave of consumerism. The buying of things to save us from our own consumerism is a paradox that will destroy our way of life. Too many are holding on to their wasteful ways too long. Even more don’t see the error of their ways at all.

So I ask, where will I be? Will I already be passed on? Will I be too elderly to truly feel the pain? Will I know someone starving to death and not be able to help? Will my friends and I go bankrupt in the second coming of the Great Depression? Will I leave a dying planet to my children? Will I be forced to defend my home as the rest of the world wages war with it’s sole superpower in a fight of its resources? Will nations rise up against our imperialism on the nightly news? Will I always live surrounded by a vague looming fear of an unknown, ambiguous, and imaginary enemy?