Yard Sale Nation: The Change Required to Salvage U.S Society Runs Much Deeper Than Most Imagine

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Yard Sale Nation: The Change Required to Salvage U.S Society Runs Much Deeper Than Most Imagine

By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted January 21, 2009.

Say goodbye to the 'consumer society.' Familiar touchstones of contemporary American life have to go. No more fast money and no more credit.



Barack has Obama stepped into the shoes of Lincoln, FDR, Millard Fillmore and forty other predecessors -- this time as the wished-for Mr. Fix it of a nation run into a ditch. Surely over the months of transition, someone with a clear head and a fact-laden portfolio has clued-in the new President about the reality-based state-of-the-Union -- as opposed, say, to the Las Vegas version, where Santa Clause presides over a whoredom of something-for-nothing economics, and all behaviors are equally okay, and consequence has been sliced-and-diced out of the game … where, in the immortal words of Milan Kundera, anything goes and nothing matters.

Mr. Obama deserves credit for a lot of things, but perhaps most amazingly his ability to see "hope" in a public so demoralized by their own bad choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded, challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout. There's a lot of raw material from sea to shining sea, admittedly, but how do you re-shape it into a population guided by a sense of earnest purpose, with reality-based expectations, with habits of delayed gratification and impulse control, and a sense of their own history? That will be quite a trick. Many of us -- myself included -- will be pulling for Barack. Maybe the power of his rhetoric and his sheer buff physical presence can whip this republic of overfed clowns into shape.

He inherits a government of superficially gleaming marble edifices -- all gloriously on view tomorrow -- but full of broken machinery within, infested with weevils, termites, and rats. The USA is functionally bankrupt. We have no money. The pixel "money" being emailed over to the insolvent banks has no basis in reality beyond the quiver in Ben Bernanke's voice as he announces each new injection. Yet all reports so far indicate that President Obama is bent on continuing the process one way or another.

Mr. Obama's first task taking stage in the lonely Oval Office should be to get right with his own credo of "change," meaning he'll have to persuade the broad American public that the "change" required to salvage this society runs much deeper, colder, and thicker than they'd imagine in their initial transports over hallelujah-Bush-is-Gone. Many of the familiar touchstones of the recent American experience have got to go. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/121146/yard_sale_nation%3A_the_change_required_to_salvage_u.s_society_runs_much_deeper_than_most_imagine/

[Vinca]

1. Interesting title "Yard Sale Nation."

Yesterday I searched ebay for items that included the phrase "medical bills" in the description. Then I used the words "bankruptcy" and "foreclosure." It's very sad people are selling their collections, family heirlooms and general "stuff" just to keep from going under. Some poor woman is selling the contents of her sewing room - small bits of patchwork and material. It's crazy.

[KharmaTrain]

2. Redirection Of Priorities...

Yep...it is the end of the easy credit society...for now. Right now any credit is tough to get and both the money and the investors needed to restart this machine will be hard to come by for a while. If anything, it will be the government that will fuel the economy for the near term and their priorities won't be in selling wide screen TVs and building strip malls and housing developments. The focus will be on infrastructure that will create jobs, will put money in people's pockets but it's gonna take a while before it restores the massive consumer culture we used to know. And that's assuming many of the companies that are now drowning in their own financial messes come out of this thing whole.

[arcadian]

10. Yup. we have been living in the 1950s for far too long.

Time to dispose of the American Dream and create a reality that is sustainable for ALL Americans.

[terisan]

3. The supposed stimulus is another rip off just as the bailout was. nt

[jazzjunkysue]

4. Europe has always been more reasonable: Smaller living quarters and less crap.

They don't speculate and build unwanted developments of homes or retail space. They use what they already have. They recycle everything. They don't value their lives according to what they consume.

This is a uniquely american problem: Good: Big, new, perfect, individual, disposable, complicated.
Bad: Used, old, simple, standard.

In america, we believe we need a special cover for our ipod to express our individuality. That goes for the watch, refridgerator, washer, car, you name it.

Everything has to gratify the endless insatiable ego.

In case anyone else has realized it, Eckhart Tolle was right: This false world, this mass delusion, that things will make us happy, will fall under it's own weight.

In the next few years, we will all have to choose between our money and our loved ones.

We're all about to find out alot about ourselves and those we value.

[CrispyQ]

5. Well said!

:thumbsup:

"Happiness doesn't come from having things; it comes from being part of things."
~Chris in the morning, Northern Exposure

[Sanity Claws]

6. But Europe is having deep problems too, despite these

differences.
Greece is having riots.
Iceland's government is likely to fall today, following what some have called riots.
In Ireland, real estate values may fall 80%.
I don't place all our problems on the American consumer.

[bear425]

7. This commentary should be a stand alone post.

Very well said and so true.

Eckhart Tolle is right and so are you.

[MountainLaurel]

9. Yep

The disposability (a word I am coining now if it doesn't already exist) appalls me, and I know that I am just as guilty as anyone. It's cheaper to buy a new printer for the computer rather than get the existing one fixed. Same for pretty much everything in the house beyond major appliances. Pants get a rip: get a new pair. Meanwhile, I live in a city that makes recycling as difficult as possible.

[starroute]

8. He's half right, at best

The most obvious weakness in his article is his casual dismissal of technology -- as though we were going to give it all up and head back into the 1930's. The internet and related technologies are precisely what's going to make it possible to decentralize, to make farming and distribution far more efficient than ever before, to institute new means of communication in place of having to haul a couple of tons of metal across town just so that two people can hold a meeting.

Yes, things are going to have to change dramatically -- but when we're done, the world is going to look nothing like 1937. It will be faster, sleeker, and with more possibilities for meaningful activity than ever before -- and we will wonder how we ever tolerated the sluggish, bloated systems of the last 30 years.

The other part that really bothered me is his hand-wringing over the possibility that the old folks might turn to fascism if we tell them to go starve in the gutter. There's an emotional disconnect there -- as if he's unable to face directly the implications of what he is proposing be done to senior citizens and therefore has to project his unacknowledged sense of atrocity onto their imagined response.

Finally, his image of all of us spending the next several decades surviving by recycling our plastic Hello Kitty keychain ornaments seems seriously misguided. Recycling has never lived up to its promise -- and I say this as someone who's been doing my part for over 30 years -- and while it may have some role to play, I suspect we're going to get farther by exploring new possibilities than by beating our heads against the problem of disposing of the largely useless detritus of the 20th century.

Let a more affluent and leisured time figure out the Hello Kitty problem -- we're going to be far too busy for that sort of frivolity.

[Ezlivin]

11. His dismissal of technology stems from his mistrust in its ability to "save" us

He's compared the modern American's belief in technological solutions to the cargo cults of the South Pacific and other areas.

The typical American finds it easy to believe that regardless of the difficulties facing us that our technology will rescue us. An oft-heard retort is "If we can put a man on the moon we ought to be able to...."

It's not that Kunstler dismisses technology itself but rather the role it can play in restoring our society. Basically he does not see technology as the panacea for all of our problems.

[anonymous171]

12. The Corporations designed, built, and deployed the "Consumer Lifestyle"

As soon as they rebuild, they will do it all over again. We need to get them now while they are down.

[blues90]

14. That's true.

What people need to do now is stop buying any and all imported crap and stop shopping at box stores whcih will crush the outsourcing and importing of goods we can make here.

I have gotten ride of everything other than basic needs and don't plan on buying anything outside of these items ever again. Not that I had a lot of stuff but I did have things that I never really needed.

Part of the progress and flow of new products outdating the old has to end so people aren't forced to upgrade and in turn create waste.

We now have many cheap products that cannot be repaired and were designed not to be repaired and become obsolete in a year.

It reached a point where it was cheaper to buy new than to repair anything and that is part of the problem too.

[bertman]

13. There's a lot of truth in what Kuntsler is saying, but I also agree with starroute that

technology could be a saving grace for us.

This is all about taking the best and most sustainable parts of our contemporary lives and combining them to make a better world, while at the same time letting go of the old, wasteful habits.

There's a book out called "Cradle to Cradle" by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that describes how technology can help us to be better stewards of our planet. We now have the technological knowledge and tools to make our world totally reusable, not recyclable. It's no longer a technical challenge, but a challenge of outlook and attitude.

We have the way, now we just need to muster the will.

[jazzjunkysue]

15. It's always been about will, not way. That's what capitalism cannot do:

Think long-term and sustainable. For that, you need laws, limits, taxes, regulations, all the things we forgot.