The Road Ahead
I don’t know too many people who would would disagree that the decade from 2000 to 2009 was the worst in memory; perhaps ever. Since the events of September 2001, America has not been the place it used to be. Not even close. In the ensuing years we’ve been fixated on this problem while ignoring a gathering storm of other problems. When it’s all said and done this may have turned out to have been myopic at best. After all, it’s impossible to see how we will succeed in defeating terrorism when they spend a dollar and we counter with a billion of them – that’s a suckers game with a bad outcome.
One might think that if there were a military solution to this problem, our Israeli friends would have discovered it by now but we know that’s not the case. We spent much of our post-WWII wealth crafting the most powerful military force on the planet. I’d take our guys any day in a bet over who would win any sort of warfare where tanks, planes, missiles, and ‘boots on the ground’ matter. But when it comes to stopping a 20 year-old woman from entering a crowded nightclub with a bomb strapped to her back, the US military is the most expensive, yet ineffectual tool ever created.
The decline of the Western Empire isn’t pretty to watch and from here out, it likely won’t be nearly as comfortable either. And of course it’s politicized – everything in America is now politicized. It’s our new form of entertainment with endless hours of talk radio and television where blowhards from all sides of every issue work tirelessly to defeat the “other” side, as if we all aren’t on the “same” side.
We learned in 2007 that capitalism was a major failure when the taxpayers were forced to bail it out. Most Americans, myself included, have a terribly difficult time admitting that our way of life no longer works and is no better than socialism, communism, and all the other –isms. That’s because we have anecdotal evidence that it can be made to work; but the game requires that there be more honest players than crooks and deep down in our heart of hearts, we all know that boat has sailed.
America has become like an old house that hasn’t been tended to regularly. The roof is leaking, the porch is sagging and termites have been hard at work in many unseen places under the floor and in the walls where the damage is extensive. Many seem to be waiting on the crew from ‘Extreme Home Makeover’ to arrive and fix everything while we go on another vacation; but that’s not going to happen.
Reality will force us to change everything that cannot be sustained. The future is going to be about less. Much less. Monster trucks and biggie-sized meals are out. Mindless zombies burning a month of their income at a whack to watch painfully loud cars speed around an endless circle, or to witness grown men being paid millions of dollars to chase a rubber ball up and down a field are soon to be sorely disappointed. As are those that make a fortune from them.
No one seems to have paid much notice that oil has crept back up to around $80 a barrel, a level that if sustained will put the airlines out of business once and for all. Energy and other natural resources are going to continue to be more problematic over the next few years. The move to alternate energy sources will continue unabated but let’s be honest with ourselves for one moment – no combination of alternative energy will fully replace oil.
Even with all the blather about wind, solar, and other forms of energy, there remains that faulty underlying assumption that we won’t be forced to re-scale our way of life. Humongous vehicles are still coveted and everyone still wants to be able to drive them endless miles; we just want to be able to do that with something other than gasoline.
And then there is the problem of government. It’s too big, too unwieldy, too costly, and it’s becoming more incompetent with each passing year. One of the biggest stories of the last decade is the spectacular collapse of State and Local governments.
California has gone from Golden State to Bankrupt State in a heartbeat. Unable to pay its employees last summer, they were given IOUs instead of paychecks.
In my own home town, in fiscally conservative Indiana, the mayor and the town counsel had determined to turn off 85% of the street lights and close the animal shelter because we can no longer afford them. That has been avoided for now because of a decision to tack on an extra $20 to every moving vehicle violation written. It doesn’t get much more pathetic than a city of 100,000 being unable to run even the street lights except for the benevolence of speeders and parking violators.
It’s difficult to find a silver lining in that enormous dark cloud, but that is what most of us try to do. All of us will continue to live and work as best we can and we will look for whatever specks of happiness and enjoyment that we can wring out of life. And that’s as it should be. Life is for the living and even when dealt a bad hand the game must go on.
But make no mistake, the next decade is going to be a tough one for most of us and we will be forced to make adjustments to survive it.
That’s why I’m planning to alter the focus of what I’ve been writing about in this space. I don’t intend to turn this into a scary survivalist manifesto, but there are certain emerging trends and topics which will command attention in the New Year and I intend to cover some of them.
I’m giving you this “heads up” because I do understand that most of my readers are radio hams and for some odd reason, many seem adverse to reading anything that isn’t directly related to the hobby. Certainly that’s your prerogative. For years I have posited that this isn’t a ham radio blog, rather, I happen to be a radio ham who blogs. But this has been frequently missed by some readers despite my many efforts to set the record straight.
Looking at 2010 and beyond, the road ahead looks very rough and reality dictates that we must take it. So be it. Let’s endeavor to enjoy the journey – that should at least frustrate The Fates and give us a little satisfaction at the same time…
Happy New Year!
In: blog · Tagged with: america, economy, prediction, survival
on January 2, 2010 at 10:15 am
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Couldn’t agree with you more.