USA a Sinkhole: What’s Worth Fighting For? [View all]

[HomerRamone]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-stanton/55782/usa-a-sinkhole-what-s-worth-fighting-for


If there were fully functional representative democracy in the USA—and with that a coherent US National Security Strategy that includes the health and welfare of its domestic infrastructure and its people—the USA would not be collapsing from within even as it stirs up mayhem, enmity and civil war nearly everywhere around the globe.

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It is laughable that they proclaim as their mission “the teaching” of American values to foreigners...Just what are those American values? Maternal death rates on the rise in 2014; 16 million children on some sort of food aid in 2014; 8.2 percent of children born below 2500 grams; 14 percent of Americans unemployed; and crushing debt loads for the bulk of students graduating from America’s colleges and universities. One would never know that the USA has severe structural issues with both its physical and mental infrastructure. Yet those problems are normally blamed not on American citizens/government but rather on the Russians, Climate Change, Immigrants, the Chinese, “unqualified American workers,” Big Government, and Welfare Moms.

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When duration of unemployment has been prolonged, unemployed workers progress from optimism through pessimism to fatalism. Attitudes toward the future and toward the community and home deteriorate. Children of long-term unemployed and marginally employed workers uniformly show poorer school grades. There are so many unconscious and group needs that work meets that unemployment may lead not only to generalized anxiety, but to free-floating hostility, somatic symptoms and the unconscious selection of some serious illnesses.

Albert Camus wrote that ‘Without work all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.’ Our analyses of Work in America leads to much the same conclusion: Because work is central to the lives of so many Americans, either the absence of work or employment in meaningless work is creating an increasingly intolerable situation. The human costs of this state of affairs are manifested in worker alienation, alcoholism, drug addiction, and other symptoms of poor mental health. Moreover, much of our tax money is expended in an effort to compensate for problems with at least a part of their genesis in the world of work. A great part of the staggering national bill in the areas of crime and delinquency, mental and physical health, manpower and welfare are generated in our national policies and attitudes towards work.”