Barbara Ehrenreich - Smile or Die: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Undermined America

[DeSwiss]

24. I agree with Ms. Ehrenreich....

...and yet we were warned it would be this way in the not-too-distant future, but few wanted to believe it. And even fewer knew what to do about it. So as usual, we left it up to government to tell us what to do, and they said nothing. Government basically reacts to situations (and usually quite badly) rather than planning to avoid problems that are not clearly defined. Not unless you're planning trip to the moon or something:

''While covering Congress, it occurred to us that big technological and social changes were occurring in the United States, but that the political system seemed totally blind to their existence. Between 1955 and 1960, the birth control pill was introduced, television became universalized, commercial jet travel came into being and a whole raft of other technological events occurred. Having spent several years watching the political process, we came away feeling that 99 per cent of what politicians do is keep systems running that were laid in place by previous generations of politicians.

Our ideas came together in 1965 in an article called 'The future as a way of life', which argued that change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people. We coined the phrase 'future shock' as an analogy to the concept of culture shock. With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture.'' ~Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)