All politics aside, it seems like our country might be getting back to basics. Or at least trying to. I almost feel as if the best of times were back in the early 1900s when people had to struggle a little more. When it didn’t seem like everybody thought they deserved the best simply because they were American. I recently visited the graves in Normandy and was humbled. At a time when so many had so little , the dream of house ownership was just that and everyone was struggling to give this country identity, thousands of Americans made the ultimate sacrifice to prove what this country meant to them. Now, far too many people depend on this legacy to promote their own narrow vision of American greatness. In this shortsightedness, the quest to accumulate wealth has become our motivation, and in it’s wake jobs have moved overseas, we demand the lowest possible prices at the peril of our own productivity and, more importantly, we’re losing our identity. What can we say makes us great anymore? We don’t want to or can’t take care of the the most vulnerable among us and far too frequently see dollar signs as the only reason for doing anything.
However, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe, just maybe, we’re all starting to pay a little more attention to how we’ve been doing business. The experiment of the last 30 years has failed. Making money, while important, is suddenly playing second fiddle to being a good citizen. Maybe this most recent financial slap in the face has been the wake up call we all needed to stop feeding this beast of consumerism and helped us to get back to living as needed and not as the advertisements tell us we need to. I’m sick of constantly being told that I need to buy more in order to stimulate the economy. Maybe the problem is that we were already buying too much. Maybe we were rewarding an economy that merely made us spend more but didn’t enrich our lives and this great economic failure is more a great correction of decades of decadent opulence.
I say “Here, here.”