"It will take generations to fix the damage" - Fuck that defeatist noise!

[snot]

38. I personally believe

that our biggest problems are complex and that quick fixes for them are few.

But the biggest hurdle is that so few people who want constructive change can take the time needed or are otherwise equipped to dissect the complexity.

E.g., I believe that the massive consolidation of MSM ownership in the wake of the Telecom Act of 1996; the repeal of Glass-Steagall; the decisions not to regulate credit derivatives and, after the GFC of 2008, to regulate them weakly; the chronic failure to enforce existing antitrust law; the defunding of the SEC and other regulatory agencies; the failure to pass the ERA; the frequent, massive increases in the national debt in order to finance wars of little benefit to anyone other than oligarchs; the massive reductions in the taxation of the 1%; the concerted takeovers by conservatives, often without serious opposition from liberals, of school boards, university boards, and charitable organizations' boards; the decision not to treat cell phone communications as entitled to Fourth Amendment and other Constitutional privacy protections; the failure of the courts to prohibit governments from using threats or the promise of profits in order to induce contractors or other private parties to carry out censorship, surveillance, and other actions that those goverments could not Constitutionally carry out directly themselves... I consider almost any of these factors to have been far more important contributors to our current misery than most of the causes and cures I see more widely discussed.

But that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up. It means that those of us who have the time to read the news, share, and perhaps even take action should also try to make sure we understand the complex, often systemic causes of our problems.

We can't all work on or even understand all of them; but all we need is for each of us to gravitate toward the one or few topics that we're most interested in and best equipped to analyze, and work on those.

My 2¢, for what they're worth.