The Cure

"Stocks fall as investors can't shake economic woes" reads the Associated Press headline at Yahoo! Finance this morning. For investors looking for "creative instruments" to park money in, hoping to see the pile double in size, these are hard times. And let's hope hard times are here to stay for such people.

This country is not just suffering from recession; it's in transition from one way of life to another. The changes necessary to this process will be painful, but in the end we'll be better off for it. The foremost prophet of our time, James Howard Kunstler, says of our current predicament:

Peak energy has combined with the diminishing returns of over-investments in complexity to pull the "kill switch" on our vaunted "way of life" -- the set of arrangements that we won't apologize for or negotiate. So, the big question before the nation is: do we try to re-start the whole smoking, creaking hopeless, futureless machine? Or do we start behaving differently? (The emphasis is mine.)

The answer is we'll start behaving differently because we have no choice. We simply don't have the resources, financial or otherwise to continue with the foolish, wasteful, prodigal, offensive, frivolous, excessive, selfish, and destructive way of life we've pursued the last 60 years.

Here's an example of what I mean: this past week I had a dreadful experience with the local arm of the medical-industrial complex. A simple office visit to a doctor turned into a high-pressure attempt to railroad the patient (me) into submitting to a series of highly technical, highly expensive, and highly questionable diagnostic testing procedures, at least one of which was totally unrelated to the complaint that had brought me there. Fortunately, I saw in an instant what was happening, that the patients of this particular mega-clinic are not being treated so much as farmed for whatever insurance money is accessible to these white-coated vampires and their Darth Vaderish masters hidden away in the corporate suites.

We're not going to continue to do "medical care" that way in this country, and the sooner people rebel and refuse that kind of "treatment," with its outrageous expense and unjustifiable complexity, the sooner we can rationalize our health care system, whether it remains private, becomes public, or we opt for some kind of public/private combination.

My solution was to call my yoga teacher and ask her if she knew of a holistic practitioner in the area. She does, and I'm in the process of setting up an appointment with an MD practicing in an urban Seattle neighborhood who does not accept insurance, but instead charges an affordable fee. That's the sort of thing we're going to have to go back to.

That's just an example. Name any topic -- transportation, domestic industry, banking and finance, agriculture -- (especially agriculture, because many of the people now working in cubicles will before too long be working on farms and ranches instead) and we're looking at a future characterized by less complexity, less money, less consumption, and a way of life based on the production of tangible assets of real value rather than schemes and scams and sharp practices.

This is going to be a great country again. We're going to re-learn how to manufacture things, and build things, and grow real food. And we're going to learn how to cooperate rather than compete, and how to pull together instead. We will no longer have the time or inclination to listen to greedheads who cop a towering resentment at the fact that it costs money to operate a civilized society, and that everybody needs to contribute proportionally to the enterprise. Taxes is what I'm talking about. If people don't like it, my advice is "Love it or leave it, Baby."

We're going to get over ourselves. A sure sign of this is that the elephant is an endangered species, and not long for this world.

And in the future we'll do away with the artificial distinction between public and private enterprise, which is the source of every swindle, ponzi scheme, and second-storey operation currently afflicting an impoverished and buggered working class. Work is work, production is production, value is value, and it matters not whence it came.