Akascribe A personal blog covering all manner of subjects

My computer was brought down by a devastating “malware” virus last week.  After I’d calmed down (it’s a helpless, terrible feeling, like having your home burglarized), and my PC was slowly being disinfected by Sharad, a Dehli-based techie operating my mouse by remote internet control, I got to thinking.  We Americans have gotten so rich and complex in our 21^st century lives that we outsource almost every aspect of our economy.  Which might not be so bad – I’ve got no intrinsic problem with globalism – except our treasury is bankrupt.  What do we Americans still do, other than buy things we can’t afford?

We have the world’s best-trained and equipped military, we are told, which we insist on redeploying in foreign conflicts.  The only problem is that these superb soldiers are not suited to fix the real underlying problems (e.g. Afghan corruption & an opium-based economy) and we cannot afford the staggering cost of protracted war (see above).

One shining hope, we are reminded, is our institutions of higher learning.  Still the envy of the world, they produce more Nobel-prize winning scientists than any other nation.  Well, I suppose that is some comfort, except that so many of the students seem to be either foreign citizens who will return to their own countries or children of the American bourgeoisie who are part of the shrinking “haves” as opposed to the growing “have nots.”  So the group of us who “make it” in the U.S. and manage to eek out a middle-class existence or even better will be hiring Latino labor to mow the lawns and babysit our kids, use Indian tech support to fix our software bugs or order our cable TV, and will continue to buy consumer goods almost exclusively manufactured in China.

Am I being overly pessimistic?  I hope so.  But in my conversations with friends and colleagues this past year – admittedly not one for the highlight reels – I keep hearing a similar negative refrain.  The sense that America’s best years are past and we’ve dug ourselves too deeply in debt and other domestic neglect to regain our footing.  Meanwhile, global warming continues on its merry way and we helplessly watch from the sidelines.

To our collective credit, we seemed to do the right thing a year ago by electing Barack Obama to the White House, but as even the most ardent Democrat must now ruefully acknowledge, the job is much bigger than one man.  Any one item on our President’s to-do list would be hard enough (health care reform, anyone?), but taken together the situation in beyond daunting.  He seems to be adopting the Anne Lamott Bird by Bird approach, which is probably wise, but politically the clock is ticking faster than the deficit counter & CO2 index combined.  Our founding fathers, we learned in school, cleverly set up the government with so many checks and balances that reform happens slowly.  But the current problems are now so monumental in scope and exponential in expansion that perhaps only benevolent dictatorship will save us.  (I know – I don’t really advocate that.  But you get the gist of what I’m saying.)

Yes, there is much to be thankful for in this post-Thanksgiving season.  The jobless rate appears to be diminishing and we apparently averted total financial meltdown.  But let’s face it – we’ve been raised to expect more than that.  Just north of utter disaster isn’t going to cut it:  we would like something that resembles true prosperity.  And it is slowly dawning on us that this seems very far off indeed.