A DARK FUTURE FOR AMERICA

I was talking to my baby, Deja, in Florida. She confirmed everything that I have been reading on various websites, blog and newspapers. The country is going to shit fast.

I can't help but be (more than a little) happy about it. They deserve it, nothing to say about that. They lived 10, 20, 100 x larger than they should have and now they are going to pay a price.

Naturally the poor are going to pay more than the rich but the poor in america, I'm sorry to say, are just as guilty for the current state of things and they certainly are more responsible than the poor in other countries. They are guiltier because they are ignorant and they accepted their ignorance. As long as they had a job, having 100 k dollars in credit card debt was manageable. The waste-as-much-as-you-can way of life was accessible to them as well. Now it is no longer.

How deep is the crisis? How long is it going to last? As much as I would like it to be the "big one", the final crisis that will bring down capitalism, I don't think it is going to be it. America is just too big, too powerful, too technologically advanced, too rich, too resourceful to collapse this time around. Its economy, as diseased as it is, is still a powerful machine that will continue to produce, consume and make other countries produce and consume. Economists now predict this to be the biggest crisis in 50+ years and they say the economic slowdown (negative growthm, stag-deflation, growing unemployment) will last for over 3 years with repercussions for the next 20 years but I don't think this will be the case. At least it won't be this straightforward.

Probably in a few months someone will come up with a new scheme to prolong this agony. Some bubble to inject new life into a dying body, plug it into a new machine to keep it breathing, at least for a while. Maybe there will be a new economic boom, and then a new collapse. But America, and the current consumistic way of life still have a few years in front of them. For sure, though, the decade long decline that the west has been experiencing, will take place more rapidly in the US. Infrastructures will not be renewed, the school system will become even less competitive, the public health insurance system will remain just as it is now: non-existent. The 3 trillion (3,000,000,000,000) dollars that Bush put into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) dollars that Bush gave to the Banks to save the economy from collapsing had to have been taken from some where. And they were taken from the people's future.

Ironically enough one of the clearest depictions of such a doomlike scenario was the one described by James Cameron in the TV Series Dark Angel (with absolutely super-hot young Jessica Alba). It's ironic because I think that american TV series in general are one of the causes and effects of the rotting away of society. They are multimillion dollar, multi episode addicting productions that distract people away from their own lives, and turn them into catatonic zombies watching someone else's life, feeling someone else's emotions (a lot like football in the rest of the World, I do admit, but at least we are more aware of it). The Funny thing is that Cameron described a new depression to occur in the beginning of the new millenium, and launched it when america's capitalism hit its peak, at the end of the nineties. Stricter rules, advanced technologies and an economic depression: all of these have actually taken place, with the fear of terrorism instilled by the republicans taking away civil liberties, more advanced technologies developed in war and the aforementioned economic downturn.

So I was talking to Deja and she confirmed that thing's are really getting rough. I can't wait to go there (for the first time in my life) and see for myself, fell the gloomy atmosphere, the breath of despair that I expect will linger in the air. To be honest i don't know if I will notice many differences right away, but in the 12 years I lived in the US (being nauseated by their way of life) the economy had only grown. I have never known a struggling america. Maybe I will like it better.