progress

We are increasingly governed by fear. We’re told we’re threatened, that we need to hold true to failed policies. We’re manipulated. Our fear is aimed in the wrong direction.

We fear attacks from terrorists and hope to increase our military strength. We’re twice as strong as the next strongest, Russia, and spend eight times more than the next biggest spender, France (and half of all global spending). We’re warned of Iran creating a nuclear bomb. China is painted as an economic threat. We’re afraid of an economic crash, hoping a bailout will stabilize the market.

Without fundamental change and rethinking of the current economic model, we won’t be able to reverse our catastrophic effect on the planet. We are, among industrial nations, dying more often from preventable causes. Our educational system has slipped in rankings and fewer can afford higher education. Our national debt is more than ten trillion dollars, an incomprehensible value.

What if we start to fear what is truly frightening?

Reports tell us terrorism-related deaths are up four hundred fifty percent since nineteen-ninety-eight. Just seven years ago we sustained the most devastating attack on domestic soil by foreign entities in our history. But, if we omit Iraq from those numbers because it’s a war zone, deaths are actually down forty percent since two-thousand-one.

China would rather borrow to us than Europe because we offer a single leadership to negotiate with. Economically, we’re twice as strong. They are just now coming out of an industrial age we abandoned two decades ago.

The market will crash. There’s no way to change that course without fundamentally changing the equation our system’s based on. Whether we buy out mortgages, grant loans or let massive international banks fail matters little. The system needs readjustment to continue.

What if we start to fear what is truly frightening?

The current model creates massive barriers of entry into the foundation of not only business, but government, the market. Its theories ignore resource consumption or waste production and rely on a population of informed consumers who are losing access to information. Entire ecosystems, even isolated ones, are decaying without explanation.

Among “First World” nations, we are worst in preventable deaths. Access to health care and education are the main reasons one hundred thousand people die of these causes each year. Just last year, in the United States, four hundred fifty thousand people died of coronary heart disease alone.

Nationally, about seventy percent of Americans graduate high school. That percentage is on the decline. Far fewer go on to higher education, less than thirty percent. Our economy is post-industrial so the work these non-graduates do is too often at or below a living wage without benefits.

Each American, beyond taxes, social security and living expenses, accounts for over thirty-three thousand dollars of the national debt. The debt is scoffed at, ignored. Recently, another four trillion dollars were added to its total. Like ecological collapse, this will be a problem that generations after mine will have to address.

What if we start to fear what is truly frightening?

The president will have little effect on any of our fears, yet even the candidates simplified policies are ignored in favor of more simplistic character flaws or associations. That a candidate spent time in the living room of someone who was temporarily labeled a domestic terrorist thirty years ago is mentioned more than the largest mass extinction in our history on Earth.

Until we start addressing things that are truly frightening, we will never see real progress.