shelf life of a society

Blazer Bob wrote:

Science Chic wrote: []Thanks for the post Handsome, I will sleep on it and answer in the morning. I have to say that this sentence resonated with me: People flinch from confronting difficult problems until driven to by necessity's lash.

Thanks for the complement although it does not speak well of your optometrist.

This is the part that has disturbed my sleep for over 40 years. " “There’s good reason to fear that if the economy builds a 5 percent levee the polity will just come up with a 6 percent flood. "

That is what I thought when I was young and the annual deficit was ONLY a few hundred billion. I was wrong, the levee held. Can it continue or is necessity pounding at the door.

<Imbed national debt clock here>

LOL, true beauty to me is what's on the inside, not the outside. You have demonstrated through your actions to be one of the most generous, hard-working, honest, stand-up people I've met through 285Bound and that makes you Handsome. (and has nothing to do with the fact that I've been legally blind since about the 10th grade!) rofllol

Here's my thoughts: I do think that we've gone precipitously close to becoming an entitlement society. We the People have continued to elect Representatives who increase our debt, toss in favorable regional pet projects, and kick the can down the road thinking that as the economy improves, it will all work itself out. I do not want to return to the strict austerity that Libertarians seem to want to go to in terms of government assistance (and maybe I'm not knowledgeable enough on that and acknowledge that I could be wrong there), nor do I think that much of what the current Green platform pushes is feasible either because it goes too far in government oversight and assistance, but believe we need to find the middle ground. I don't think public assistance is the major problem with our deficit though. We've got a bloated military budget wasted on inefficient, outdated methods of combating enemies and favoring the military industrial complex, and we've got too many confusing and contradicting laws that allow those in power to keep the balance tipped in their favor. When the masses start to perceive that there is an unfairness to laws being applied, and feeling powerless through their proxies, that's when revolutions occur. I see this pathway opening up before us more and more each year.

So while supporting Libertarians is appealing because it would help fix our economic woes, here's my other big concern - none that I've researched seem to get the impending environmental shitstorm, and their policies will make dealing with it infinitely worse. History has proven time and again that a society can survive an economic collapse; it cannot survive an environmental one. The Democrats and Republicans both have demonstrated to me that neither care enough about the ramifications of continuing their support of corporations at the public's expense, Tea Partiers and Libertarians refuse to accept the issue at all, so I'm left supporting the Green Party which goes against my belief that we need more government. It's not a pretty place to be, but to me it's the lesser of ALL evils when weighed against the priority issue of saving something of a decent way of life for my children's children. Because even if we focus on eliminating our debt and fixing our economy, none of that will matter a hill of beans when the oceans are swallowing our coastlines, our food prices are going through the roof because our crops are failing in vast regions and our oceans are overfished to collapse, we can't afford to fight wildfire after wildfire, or rebuild after fires and floods, disease outbreaks become more prevalent in regions they didn't occur in before, and wars break out over decreasing freshwater sources.

"People flinch from confronting difficult problems until driven to by necessity's lash...We humans adroitly use scant and equivocal evidence to convince ourselves that the most congenial interpretation of events is also the most plausible and durable."

We as a society are still largely in denial mode; necessity has not yet lashed hard enough. It will.