a new paradigm

Bob Herbert's New York Times column this morning is about the unemployment crisis (again), and the refusal of those in power to acknowledge how disastrous it is. Obama and the Seven Dwarfs (his advisors) simply refuse to understand that this is the Second Great Depression.

Herbert is beginning to sound frustrated as he addresses the ongoing disaster and the government's non-response for probably the seventh or eighth time this year alone. "Obama’s take on the May numbers seemed oddly out of touch," he writes this morning, and quotes the president saying “This report is a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day.”

A few paragraphs further down, Herbert sums up, then asks the 64-dollar question: It’s impossible to overstate the threat that this crisis of unemployment poses to the well-being of the United States. With so many people out of work and so much of the rest of the population deeply in debt, where is the spending going to come from to power a true economic recovery? The deficit hawks are forecasting Armageddon, but how is anyone going to get a handle on the federal deficits if we don’t get millions of people back to work and paying taxes?

As much as I agree with Bob Herbert, and appreciate that an influential journalist with a national audience is striving mightily to point out the obvious to those who have the power to do something about it, I can't adopt his point of view. I guess I have more faith than he does -- faith that our national government as well as many state governments are now totally dysfunctional, and will never lift a hand to help ordinary people in need. They've simply lost the ability to do so. There are a number of reasons for this which I don't feel like going into right now, but it's sufficient to say that of the 15 million people now out of work, many now at or near the expiration of their unemployment benefits and sinking into poverty, there is no help nor hope forthcoming. Many of them are now out of work for good.

That means from now on.

So I would suggest that instead of proposing a return to full employment, to the ideal of everyone holding a job so he or she can have the money to make the payments required to purchase life's necessities -- a house, a car, and medical insurance, that we adopt a new paradigm, one that stresses self-reliance and rejects consumerism absolutely. What I'm talking about is ordinary workers who are now permanently unemployed becoming ordinary peasants, living in earthen houses they make themselves (and to hell with permits, building codes, and bank loans), riding bicycles instead of driving infernal-combustion-powered vehicles (communities could have two or three trucks that would accommodate everyone's needs), and re-learning how to produce their own food supplemented by a cash crop (usually marijuana).

People might laugh at such notions and say "That's impossible." But as the cliché reminds us, necessity is the mother of invention (it's a cliché because it's true), and today's impossibility is tomorrow's reality, out of necessity. After all, people have to live somewhere and eat something. What I've described is nothing less than the lifeway of our ancestors, and of most of the people living on earth even today. I'll go into more detail tomorrow.

Click on the photo for a larger view.