The Depressed Superpower

By Gabor Steingart in Washington

As frustration takes hold in the land of optimism, Americans are beginning to resemble Germans. They are collectively depressed over the Iraq War, the weak dollar and the aging of the baby boomers. Presidential candidates are left to preach change to an electorate that is afraid of it.

All it takes to find out why America is in such a bad mood is a look at the local section of any American newspaper, at the photos of the smiling faces of soldiers killed in Iraq.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,1030719,00.jpg

All it takes to discover why Americans are beginning to doubt their own greatness is to accept an invitation to a dinner hosted by Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, DC. His vision, says Fenty, is for students in the District of Columbia to receive their books at the beginning of the school year, not in the middle. When asked whether he has other visions, the mayor nods enthusiastically. His goal, he says, is to improve security in the city's schools. Fenty wants to make sure students in the United States capital can once again leave the classroom without facing the threat of violence.

All it takes to understand why the United States, a once-proud economic power, seems so unsure about itself these days is a walk through a supermarket with author Sara Bongiorni. In her book "A Year without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy," Bongiorni describes how even those who call themselves smart shoppers have mixed feelings when they purchase low-priced, foreign-made products. "When I see the label 'Made in China,' part of me says: good for China. But another part feels a rush of sentimentality because I've lost something without exactly knowing what it is."


Read the story (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,519890,00.html)(May have to sign up)

well...makes one thing certain, America's in trouble

There is no simple solution. Therefore most people behave like our Sandy...bury their head in the sand hoping the problem will go away.

there is a simple solution...

KILL yourself

there is a simple solution...

KILL yourself

LMAO...........ohhhhh draqon

It is not that simple. The human race have become more of a race of consumers than creators. this may be a factor, though i have not done any formal surveys,and even then it is subconscious.

We need a new breakthrough.

we need to exterminate each other...that way we solve problems of Earth

:roflmao:

John99: "It is not that simple. The human race have become more of a race of consumers than creators."

True. Those who look down their noses at Americans, and presume that their own societies are immune from the excesses we have gone to, are also deluded. Our triumphs and our failures are lessons to other rising nations, to be ignored at their peril.

there is a simple solution...

KILL yourself

Go for it.

I promise to hold a seance and ask you how it's going on the "other side", and post your report in the Pseudoscience sub-forum.

Hop to it, soldier !

I wanna know if there's clouds and harps and bagel-toasting with the halo and all like that there...

People don't seem to take the concept of a "Paradigm Shift" seriously enough. The fundamental nature of human society is changing, and this is not limited to America.

This has only happened three times in the past twelve thousand years:Agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution. Humans had been living in small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers, consisting of people they'd known intimately since birth, whom they trusted and cared about instinctively. Suddenly they were settling down into permanent villages, raising food instead of going out looking for it. They had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with people who were not family members. Civilization, literally the Building of Cities. The economy of scale and division of labor of village life created the world's first surplus ("capital"), making life more secure and comfortable. Extrapolating this principle to larger settlements promised greater rewards, including entire new full-time professions like teaching and entertainment. But it required learning to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers--an override of our pack-social instinct with reasoned and learned behavior to transform into a herd-social species. Industry, the Industrial Revolution. Our connection to the land--to Mother Earth--was broken as industrial processes increased the productivity of human labor. Large migrations to cities by people taking jobs that were in many ways harder than farming and in any case separated them from nature transformed the "nature" of society.Notwithstanding the obvious wrenching effects of these first three Paradigm Shifts on the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer who still lives deep inside every Homo sapiens, they happened very slowly and allowed adaptation to span many generations. Ten thousand years after the building of the first city at Jericho, there are still Neolithic societies on earth, from the Arctic Circle to the tropics. A mere 100 years ago, more than 90% of Americans were farmers. More than half of the human race now lives in cities, but this has only been true for a year or two. In contrast:Computers, the Information Revolution, the Internet Age, the Post-Industrial Era, the Age of Aquarius--there are many names for what we're living through. The fundamental nature of society is being transformed once again, but this time very quickly. In two generations, computers have become affordable, portable, interconnected, and components of every other appliance. Everything about the way we live is changing abruptly: our jobs, our relationships, our leisure time. I'm sitting here talking to you people while "at work," waiting for a response from a co-worker--at home, in my bathrobe, with a dog lying on my feet, reggae music filling the air and a load of laundry in the dryer--physically all alone (except for the dogs) but in better communication with the rest of the population than I ever was before.The fallout from this rapid shifting of the Paradigm is enormous. Adults no longer have a lot to teach children, since half of what we know becomes "obsoledge" (Alvin Toffler's term) every year or two. The power of corporations is in jeopardy, since information-based businesses don't require massive concentrations of capital. More people are self-employed, the twilight of the profession of "supervisor." Telecommuting allows us to live wherever we want: the very artifact of the city itself may be on the wane as both business and social communication becomes virtual. National boundaries don't have the importance they used to. There is one global economy.

These are the things that make Americans depressed. :)

Our triumphs and our failures are lessons to other rising nations, to be ignored at their peril.

True. :(

People don't seem to take the concept of a "Paradigm Shift" seriously enough. The fundamental nature of human society is changing, and this is not limited to America.



Excellent post. :thumbsup:I am a big fan of Alvin Toffler. I read all his books and used it in my profession with excellent results. But then he petered out after 1985. He was 20 years ahead of everybody back then. People do not understand "Paradigm Shift" or Innovation or the word Knowledge. They are words to talk about and not to be acted on.

There is plenty of brain power in America, but the whole society has been taken over by idiots because evil spreads when good men/women do nothing.

Here are two quotes I often use:

The most important weapon in the war for economic supremacy in the 21st century will be the organization of knowledge - Alvin Toffler
The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them! - Albert Einstein

well...makes one thing certain, America's in trouble

Now it is up to 14 trillion I believe?

there is a simple solution...

KILL yourself

Or move out of the country. :shrug: Which ever way works I guess.