The 21st Century Human Experience

Life was so good for 20th century humans living in the United States; especially those that hit adulthood from 1950-1980. There is no doubt that if you were a middle class family, you only needed one of the two parents to be working to not only subsist, but also get ahead. You sent your kids to a good public school, you could let your kids go out and play in the front yard and did not worry about their safety, you saved for retirement, your house was appreciating, and even the stock market was somewhere you slowly but surely got ahead. You also had enough time to cook real food for your kids instead of living on the fast food driven economy with too little time and too many bad, fast, inexpensive food choices.

This generation also cared little or spent much time concerning themselves with the future of the planet, the food supply, or the interdependent global economy. Government for the most part worked well enough and was investing in the right things to keep the country at the leading edge - education, infrastructure, job creation, and social safety nets. Tomorrow was going to be better than yesterday and nobody ever doubted it.

I would have to say that as someone who lived through this period of time as a child, I have always thought the future would still be better than the past, but recently I am starting to believe differently. So many trends point to this: global economic meltdown, our planet is literally melting, our food supply is increasingly being compromised, our schools are not able to keep up with the demands of the 21st global economy, the haves are getting over on the have nots every minute of every day. And to top it all off, our government at all levels is paralyzed by interest groups, left vs. right, factions on all sides, and few if any people who think pragmatically about how to fix any of our problems with long term solutions. At every turn they choose the 50% solution when we need the 100% solution more than ever.

To say the least I am pissed off and feel like I have nowhere to turn. There is no doubt that I can carve out a decent life for myself, so no complaints there, but more and more I feel that if I am not super wealthy, then all I will do the rest of my days is just squeak by. Past generations left us with a heap of problems and because they were able to kick them down the road, they benefited by having somewhat easier lives with less to worry about. They no doubt benefited financially by this lack of responsibility.

So I ask the question, how do we view the generations before us that created a world that consciously or unconsciously shirked their responsibility to invest in the future of the country? Instead of think of tomorrow, they lived for the moment and gambled away the future. Two books I have read recently highlight how my generation needs to be more responsible in various aspects of our lives.

Anyone who reads Hot Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman, quickly realizes that our country has exported a desire to live like 20th century Americans to the rest of the world. If China and India decide to do this, it will all but cripple our planet. My concerted efforts to live with a lighter footprint by using CFLs, driving a hybrid, recycling, and embracing the "inconvenient truth" are but a drop in the bucket. I now have to be more responsible than my parent's generation when it comes to taking care of the Earth. Are they really the Greatest Generation? How will planet Earth survive the growth of China and India? Now I have to think more about the resources I use from energy to paper to even the packaging that comes with all that processed food. Can I live a sustainable life without leaving a heavy footprint? Are we the proverbial frogs slowly getting boiled?

Another book points more to the food supply we now subsist on. In Omnivore's dilemma, I am faced with increasingly difficult choices when it comes to what I put in my body. We are surrounded by a huge corn field filled with high fructose corn syrup. When you don't have the time or the energy to make a decent meal, the quick options out there will basically kill you faster over time. Therefore, I have to be super responsible with my food choices.

More effort, more money, and more self control. This is the mantra of just feeding myself every day. Was it easier when we had to grow or hunt for our food? If nothing else, we knew what we were eating. If you take out packaged goods with more than 5 ingredients, you remove 85% of most markets. This is becoming the fight for our health and the human body. I know it is not consciously happening, but it is easy to believe that the food industry is in cahoots with the health care industry. They make me fat so they can serve me up to the health care industry?

So I ask myself this, when will we wake up and truly do something smart as a country? When will be stop fighting about ideology and start being grown ups? Where is the push back that is at the foundation of this country? Or are we all too busy, fat, and lazy to care anymore? Have we been lulled to sleep?

At the end of day, if you saw your children always taking different sides of an issue , you would not tolerate it as a parent very long. You would teach them that nothing good comes from always fighting with each other. This is our government. Who is the parent in charge to tell them to start getting along? When will the rest of us start to take control?

When I take a step back though, I believe there is some bigger game being played here by those in power; however, I doubt they are really this smart. Think of it:

• Get your entire population striving to get ahead
• Get both parents working
• Extend them endless credit to fund the entire ride
• Give them no time to worry about anything more than making ends meet
• Feed them fast food so they have even more to worry about in the forms of disease
• Make quality healthcare more and more expensive to make it even harder to make ends meet
• Bet on them defaulting on their credit so when they do you own them even more
• Play issue based politics that has people voting against their best interests
• Defund quality education so that fewer of them have the tools to question authority and think independently
• For those that decide to pursue a quality education, make sure when they get done, they will be in debt for most of the next 20 years
  
• Control the media so all people here all day long is a narrow view of the "news" where there are two truths to every story - disinformation with rule the day
  
• Have less regulation on big business so they can do whatever they want to make money whether it is in energy, banking, health care, or the military industrial complex

This is a recipe for disaster and it is obvious we have all been duped by our Greatest Generation. We have big problems and nowhere to turn to fix them. Civilization is a total mess at this point and becoming increasingly unsustainable.

I just wonder if there will be a global event that somehow pulls the residents of the planet Earth together in some common cause that is not a war or terrorist attack. If the seas were polluted with millions of gallons of oil, don't you think the world would rally? If the seas were to rise 10 feet, don't you think the world would rally? If the planet were heating up and your home was being destroyed, don't you think you would not argue about if this was true or not and just get to work to fix it?

The pragmatist and optimist in me would think common sense will rally at some point, but I have seen so many events come and go and there is not but a pulse from the people of my country or our world. I think we have all but gone to sleep at this point and have become the can being kicked down the road by our leaders in government and business. I cannot believe we are too far gone, but when you are more concerned with maintaining power and less concerned with fixing problems this is what you get.

Wake up world - we cannot sleep much longer!