I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon. By the time you read it in the Friday newspaper, the election — barring complicated recounts — will be all over. No matter who has won, the problems facing the nation and the world are still with us. The highly partisan divides that have fractured our common humanity as Americans are still with us. Whichever side loses they will continue to shout or whisper words of doom and gloom, and most likely speak in terms of “conspiracy.”
We still have the unconscionable divide between the haves and the have-nots, the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. This while we have 14 million children living in poverty in the U.S., and one in 50 Americans is homeless. This in the nation that proclaims itself to be the most successful, the most entrepreneurial, and above all the richest nation in the history of humanity.
According to Bob Massie, president of the New Economics Institute: “If every person in the world were to consume the same number of resources required for an American lifestyle we would need five planet earths to draw from.”
Since we all live, all 7.5 billion of us, on the one planet we call Earth, it becomes obvious that the idea of unlimited growth in terms of material consumption is simply not sustainable. Both political parties held out the chimera of increasing consumer consumption as the solution to our economic problems.
We as a society have so completely succumbed to the terms of materialism as the major, if not the only measure of happiness, that we have allowed indicators of economic performance — such as Gross Domestic Product per capita, a totally unrealistic average — to override all others as measures of national success.
Terms of national success are then transferred, with no modification, to individual success. “What is he worth” has become a different way of saying how much money does that person have. Our “folk heroes” are the billionaires of our national and world scene. “Worth” is stated in terms of dollars and cents, not in terms of contribution to the good of humanity, let alone artistic or intellectual or scientific or medical progress.
Again, quoting Bob Massie: “Politicians continued to vie for votes by promising to restore the unlimited upward trend toward expansion. We must advocate for greater equality and prosperity in America but our adolescent belief that our future has no physical boundaries must give way to something far deeper and more mature.”
In this new era we must look for more sustainable patterns of distribution, of energy and all other natural resources agricultural educational and communal. A new set of economic measurements of prosperity would include health, independence, and well-being. A new take on the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that the Declaration of Independence lists as among our inalienable rights.
My hope is that we will use this new beginning to move all of our citizens, and the citizens of the world into a new era of peace and cooperation and eliminating war and bitter strife.