Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Dire straits

Yesterday -- Monday -- was a bizarre holiday exclusive to Rhode Island, which celebrates the nuking of Japan. (Really.) I came to work anyway, parked in an empty garage, and used my key card to get into a deserted, non-air conditioned building. Absolutely weird. Anyway, I did get some work done but I found the idea of doing a post here in the midst of the current unpleasantness too overwhelming.

With millions of our young people coming of age and finding that there is absolutely no prospect of employment for them, one has to think it is only a matter of time before we see the same kind of social explosion that is now happening the England. Actually it's a mystery that it hasn't happened already. While I agree with Brad DeLong's syntactically awkward observation:

If you were to ask me what thing--aside from the complete and immediate collapse of the Republican Party and the resignation of all of its legislators from both houses of the Congress: if the previous fifteen years had not taught me that Republican politicians have nothing useful to contribute to national governance the last three years would certainly have done so--would most give me confidence that America would surmount this current economic crisis, it would be personnel changes to put qualified people who saw the world as it was in the summer of 2009 into the key economic jobs [in the Obama administration] . . .

Well okay but that isn't going to happen. Instead we have a president who is neurotically anxious to confer legitimacy on the lunatic right. As desperation grows in the land, as cities go bankrupt, bridges collapse, dams break, raw sewage starts to pour into the rivers, school buildings crumble, children go hungry, our fossil fuel addiction rages on and the plains turn to deserts, will anybody in power even take notice?

Evidently not. Until what, exactly, has to happen?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The voters have to take things seriously and stop listening to the lunatic right. The "tea party" needs to be voted out of office and actual people with thinking brains need to be voted in. I'm not sure how the tea party rose to such legitimate prominence in such a short amount of time (well, I'm sure there was plenty of $ and anger involved), but it always annoys me that the progressive left never gets such a good boost. The "tea party" doesn't even exist. They're not on any ballots as such, and yet here they are.

We don't have to riot in the streets. We have to vote for the right people. Or... it's too late for even that and the only thing left is revolution.