Close the borders.
No one in, no one out. No business in, no business out. Period. If you are American, if your business is based in America, stay home and take care of your own. Not enough of a market, you say? Probably not if you are counting on making a ridiculous profit margin. Bite it already. Exactly how much money do you need anyway? For you to have all that wealth, thousands upon thousands have to fight tooth and nail to make it from measley paycheck to paycheck. How does that make you feel? Proud?
Really close the borders.
Imports, exports, rescuing other countries, blah blah blah. No more. Quit the bull about "buy American" already. Have you looked lately? Nothing is made in America anymore. If you want to sell it here, make it here. Oh, we're back to the profit question again. Yes, you'll have to pay workers and make their working conditions safe. Yes, you'll have to be sure you don't muck up the environment further. Yes, you'll have to pay benefits. You'll no longer be making throw-away crap, and you'll be doing something good. If that isn't good enough for you, leave the country.
There's a food shortage here too.
Or maybe it's more likely that people can no longer afford to buy food if they put gas in their cars to get to work. Once again, what is grown here is sold here. Period. If we don't currently grow something we need, well, grow it.
Control the gas prices already. Duh.
If the government was truly by the people, for the people, this situation wouldn't be happening. What I'd really like to know with 100% accuracy is how many refineries exist in the US, how many gallons of refined gasoline comes from one 50 gallon barrel of crude, and I'd like to know the real cost of refining crude. Not lies, not creative bookkeeping - the truth. Then I think a 40% profit is enough for you greedy jerks to make.
The downfall of national - and international - consumerism.
It's here. It's happening. It's Armageddon for capitalism. We have all been programmed to sell our time and spend what money we make on the products we assemble while making a few S.O.B.s very, very wealthy. It's against the law to sell the milk you get out of your own cows. You have to have all kinds of licenses and permits to sell the produce you grow from a roadside stand. The little local farms are long gone, bought out by mass producers of everything we eat. If you ever saw a chicken farm you'd never eat chicken again. Thousands of chickens, wall to wall white with red flecks, crammed into a huge building so long that you can't see the other end -- but you sure can smell it. Grains and produce are genetically altered and livestock is shot up with antibiotics and hormones. No wonder we're all fat and dying of cancer! I want local food!
You have a voice - use it.
I'm not talking about putting up yet another blog, or social networking. I'm talking about going out there and getting people together. It works best if it is in small groups where everyone is truly heard. Don't just go along with what everyone else says, think for yourself and decide for yourself. The people coming down right now are the rich bastards. But, they don't have to bring us down too. We are the majority and it's time that we took control of our own lives.
I'm tired of the sodomy.
You bet I am. I'm tired of inequality, of chauvinism, of the imbalanced distribution of wealth. I'm disgusted with the human race, with the stupidity of wars, of the inability to define and live per a belief system, of the idiots that suck down beer and get fat in front of a boob tube. And I'm totally disgusted with dogmatic fundamentalism based on some psychopath's interpretation of teachings that have been around longer than the dirt we walk on. I'm horrified at the 'devout' Sunday church-goers that come home to beat children adopted for the state aid and starve them and all their livestock.
Make this a better world!
It takes each and every one of us. No one can sit this one out. Yes, it's the end of the world as we know it. Now it's time to make a world that's worth living in.
There's going to be a bigger food shortage here if they don't figure out what to do about the darn bees. Living in a state that produces lots of fruits and vegetables, farmers are very worried.
ReplyDeleteBees? What state? Tell me more!
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Rainbow!
Theresa
Response:
ReplyDeleteClosing borders
As far as interfering with the politics of other countries (via war, bribes, assassinations, etc.), yeah, we need to cut it out. Sure, it may eliminate some potential threats to America before they become dangerous, but I bet it pisses a lot more people off - we make more problems than we solve.
No imports? No exports? Say goodbye to coffee, and tobacco, and good foreign cars (you know, the ones that actually do try to be fuel efficient?) A lot of the things us consumers get in America either:
A. Don't grow in America, or can't be grown in enough quantities to supply what we currently consume.
B. Are so much more advanced or complex than what we make here that the typical American is too stupid/lazy/stuck-up to make them.
Unfortunately, a lot of the things that are available to even the poorest of us are imports, and if we cut that off, we're cutting off a lot of the luxuries that we've grown so addicted to. Not to mention the negative effect it would have on many other counties' economies because they've become so dependent on being America's bottom-feeders.
And if you think the rich fuckers feel anything about the poor, think again. They don't even recognize us as people, just as capital to their business. We are just numbers on paper. Denial can work wonders on the conscience.
Food Shortages
Grow the stuff we need where? If we close our borders and start putting up a ton of factories here in the US, that's going to take up a lot of land that could be farmed. And don't forget that after 60-some-odd years of having a throw-away culture, we've got landfills and gigantic paved parking lots coming out the ass. If we decide we're going to start making stuff here and growing stuff here, say goodbye to what forests we have left, as well as any concept of a rural lifestyle. (And you thought just the natural gas drills were bad...)
Gas Prices
"By the people, for the people" is a lie that only the ignorant sheep of the masses believe in. The government of America is as tyrannical and self-serving as any of the so-called Communist states of the last century. They're just better at getting the people they control to ignore the truth.
And on the actual topic: they can charge as much as they want, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it, thanks to the way the country's infrastructure is built on gasoline-powered transportation. Very few people live close enough to work to walk, and we're so dependent on distant suppliers and manufacturers of the things we consume, and distant markets that sell the things that are made/grown/mined/etc. locally, that gas is a necessity to life as we know it. America practically wrapped the chains around its own wrists with that one.
The Downfall of Consumerism
Consumerism never actually existed. It takes a certain amount of intelligent people to actually work, and this world is in very short supply of those.
Our voice...
...falls on deaf ears. The way things are now, no matter how much bitching and moaning people do, either as individuals or in large numbers, nobody is actually required to listen to us. Boycotts can work for some things, but there are many things (gas, for example), that are just not possible to boycott. And worker strikes? Ha, as you pointed out, there's too few actual workers in America making anything in enough quantities to make any impact with a strike.
Sodomy
I read that, and one and three words (and a punctuation) popped into my head: "What the fuck?" Then I realized it was metaphor...
All I can say to this is: welcome to the Human Race. Nice to know you can see it for what it really is.
A Better World
The one fundamental disagreement I have with this is this: "all of us". It is not going to take "all of us" working together to fix it, but instead "many of us" being removed entirely to give the rest a chance to get the world back to a point that it's actually worth living in. Nothing short of a massive reset of the human race and a total destruction of all we've become accustomed to will bring about the salvation of our species.
On the bright side, we're pretty much moving full-speed ahead toward that very reset. I only hope I'm around to see the fireworks.