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I wish i were smart enough to write the scathing political message in my head and then be able to DEFEND it from ensuing comment. I wish the milieu which I sense could be borne out in statistical fact at my fingertips..... or that the general MEDIA had already picked up on this such that I could quote THEIR research and fact-checking instead of having to do my own.
I wish I could merely say: So how does it FEEL? How do you LIKE battening down the hatches against the oncoming wave of sentiment that has always been there but felt somehow harmless from your lofty position of being the one in power? The power that comes from not being necessarily the most wealthy, nor the most wise, nor the most... I don't know... the most powerful merely by the fact of your NUMBERS? What happens when those numbers dwindle to a minority? Yes. How DOES it feel?
I wish I could point out the obvious: that it doesn't take much for those in real power to push those buttons, those feelings of unease, that clinging, and to coalesce it into a movement because, in fact, the base of power of the powerful is, of course, the strength in numbers; numbers that have produced the culture, the governance, the WEALTH to sustain itself as the powerful. It is talking in circles, I know, but that is precisely what it is: a cycle of culture that reinforces itself by its own rules and, like those tropical storms which become hurricanes, get bigger and bigger.
I wish I could eloquently speak to the CULTURE and pose the question: what makes you think you have the RIGHT to the Perpetual and Instantaneous? Why this insistence on 300 TV channels? On movies at the snap of your fingertips? On communicating with your friends or anybody who will listen to you merely because you CAN? On getting confused that you owe yourself a persona fashioned from that which you glean from your 300 channels? On needing this illusion of control that manifests itself in everything from Twitter to Fantasy Football? On music that needs to run constantly through your ears like a movie soundtrack? On needing houses that can only be defined as redundant? On needing to get to places in carriages that would have only been for royalty in other times? On finding out that those same carriages, designed to get you there instantly, are frustrated by the hordes of similarly-minded carriages? On thinking this abundance of food in the supermarket is not, exactly, food? I would ask: is the Pursuit of this entitled life, in fact, Life itself?
I wish I had the courage to ask (even myself): where do you think all of this entitlement is coming from? What is sustaining this pursuit? Do you really think that because you merely have a job, get money, use that money to buy all of the paragraph above--the cellphones, the HD3D flat screens, the energy-saving hybrid vehicles, the running shoes, the fitness center memberships, the washer-dryers that are raised up so you don't have to bend over, the yards with the monocultures of grass, all of it--do you actually think that your job, your productivity, PAYS for all that? And what happens when you lose that job? Do you STILL feel entitled to all the cultural booty everybody else has?
I wish I had the knowledge, the wisdom, the, ahem, CHARISMA to put all of this together, and create a lens through which we could, as a culture, as a nation, look at the underlying sentiment in immigration and undocumented aliens, look at wars and global police actions, look at cultural diversity in ways beyond tourism and cuisine, look at disease and disasters and relate them to social inequities, distribution of opportunity, education, healthcare.
That's what I wish I could write.
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