The Gums of August

Today we must be on alert at all times. Color-coded, headline-grabbing, the fear crawl along the bottom of the TV screen. But all the time? That’s a teeth-grinding isometric recipe for a nervous breakdown. And to what end? Should we all carry guns, like they do in Baghdad?

Panic may lead us to stash water and food and gasmasks...these are largely sensible, but also ridiculously overdramatic, responses, given the odds you’ll be hit with something for which such preparations will be the difference between life and death.

So while I recommend martial alertness and emergency civil defense in all its forms, there are also sensible steps we can take as a society that are longer range--and more important. These are steps to strengthen the social and economic fabric of our society…steps that need to be addressed by our government now.

Take, for example, the recent discussion of the employment numbers the dramatic difference between the traditional manufacturing employment and household survey numbers. The meaning of their difference is not elusive to normal folks, although it does seem to mystify both politicians and economists. They show that more people are starting “businesses” in their homes out of hope born of desperation and the lack of jobs with any benefits in the traditional workplace.

The odds of these so-called businesses succeeding are small. Most startups fail. But they show up in the household survey as new jobs. And each time the same person starts a new business on the ashes of an old one…why that’s a new job in the household survey.

We must do better than that. Because these entrepreneurs are also swelling the numbers of the medically uninsured and of the credit overextended.

When this house of cards collapses, sometimes called the middle-class squeeze, acts of entrepreneurial desperation will lead a small number to antiestablishment sympathies and even antisocial acts of anarchy.

This is not speculation, just a simple reflection of one of the truths of history. Wise leaders and smart empires take note of the swelling ranks of the disaffected and act to alleviate that suffering before it blows up into revolutionary fury. That’s why, beyond any humanitarian impulses, we send foreign aid to countries in collapse.

Argue if we must with the precise details of our social safety net, but we need to thrash out exactly how to address this matter now. Just as surely as we need to tighten up security on our borders.

To hear millionaire pundits and privileged politicians opine about being an entrepreneur is a mockery in the face of the reality of our basic capitalistic system. This country has no more open range. It has a tax structure that requires expensive advice to deal with. No man is an island anymore and the concept of the lone individual mastering his fate is a laughable construct in a world of big corporations and big government.

Start a computer company in your garage? About 5 guys succeeded starting out that way out of the thousands and thousands who tried the same thing. The odds are about the same as winning a lottery.

Besides, you’re violating local zoning and business laws by manufacturing or doing business in your garage. So you’ll probably get busted if your try it and actually start doing enough business to succeed.

My point in this long summer of our discontent is that together both the Right and the Left are managing in their conflicts to create the class war they both argue over the existence of so vehemently. Some eat cake today, some only bread.

That’s not enough to start riots in the streets. But when the bread runs out, trouble will go from brewing to ready to drink. Shouldn't we consider some better manner of strengthening our country now? Isn’t it time to ensure that American citizens get security from desperate want over basic things, like food and health-care and education and shelter? Somehow. Don’t we have the expertise to work out some plan that makes unemployment a transition to employment, not to the slums and poor houses of the 19th century…that gave rise, by the way, to Marxism and a long struggle between democracy and totalitarianism?

I know, you say this smacks of socialism. Well our present system, so rife with corporate socialism, already straight-jackets the individual (unless you can afford really good lawyers and accountants). I say that paying for an army that does not protect my neighborhood smacks of socialism, too. I say sticking your nose into my bedroom is socialism, too, big time.

But guess what, everything is a combination of the common good and individual freedom.

One final note on how to we create a class war. When folks fall through the cracks they end up in prison. And prison is, bar none, the most significant arena in which conversion to radical Islamic (and Aryan) terrorism takes place here in America.

And, just a thought, we are putting more folks, some violent psychopaths and many others just the social debris that fell through those cracks, in prison every year.

That’s a real smart strategy to combat the rise of anti-American and anti-democratic forces, isn’t it?
¶ 7:06 PM