By A. Daniel Bodine
EL PASO—You'd thought from glimpsing her face behind the wheel of her automobile she was among this group in the news now that thinks doomsday is May 21, and was hellbent on wrapping up loose ends before going over yonder. If she was a lit fuse to a time bomb, the frozen, stoic ashes of social minimalism followed her down the highway.
No time to waste! her face clearly said, as she approached from the opposite direction, and zipped by me in passing. We were on North Zaragoza Road at a traffic light intersection, maybe a half-mile from the school where I go to pick up my daughter Kareli every afternoon. Two ships passing in the mid-afternoon—one without even acknowledging the others existence; oblivious to her surroundings.
Furrows on her forehead were clearly visible; both hands appeared to be clutching the steering wheel tight; and her eyes, those dark, worried(?), fawn eyes, fixed millions of miles off somewhere it appeared but, too, straight ahead down the highway of course—two dark-colored, small, saucer-like spaceships hurrying by without even noticing that someone else was there on that spot also.
An insulted voice inside me wanted to yell at her, Hey you! Down the highway! You occupy this great big planet with at least one other person, 'ya know!!?
Why couldn't she have done the courtesy of at least acknowledging with a simple, brief glance, that another human being on this same day and time, for a second at least, was on the same patch of earth that she was on, separated by just a few passing feet of pavement and the exteriors of two automobiles? Huh? Are we that irrelevant to each other now? Except within our close inner mingling circles?
Has corpocracy's radical capitalism's spinoff, social minimalism, reduced most people's focus in life to only those persons “who can do something” for them? And if you're not in that close-knit circle, go take a hike!? Buzz off! There simply is no time for you? That's the way cards are being played now? Really?
I don't even exist!!? Is that what she was telling me!?
Ever since publishing Minimalism: Does God Need More Assistants? (Xlibris Press) in early '08, a small book describing some of our social ills then (that, it turned out, portended America's economic collapse a few months later), I've found myself pausing in moments like this—the irrelevancies we foolishly pretend to be to each other—to question where we got it all wrong in our global political development model back there.
By we, I mean the United States, for decades acknowledged worldwide as the leader of the Free World and the designers of the future. As that May 21 doomsday group is now saying, did we really plant these greedy, apathetic seeds of ignoring each other—unknowingly while riveted on staking out our own identities? And have moved even more downstream now, to what some whackos say, to being locked in on a futuristic collision course to self-destruct in Armageddon? Huh?
That's not the way the schools taught it! In a political science graduate school class once the professor I remember laid out his own model for the progression of Western man. Sterling silver performance, it was. Starting with early, prehistoric men and women as hunters and foragers; to the transition from small wandering groups into migrating tribes; progressing on to finding stability as farmers, to communities and cities solidifying into city states and then provinces.
Each development stage had its own behavior traits, of course, the way people acted in them. (Oh, how we uppity ones loved to spot society's provincials!) Finally the model advanced to the Nation State and to further neutralizing differences and coalescing a nation's energy thru the Welfare State; and further into the Post Welfare State; and on finally to what “we the U.S.” were in, or in the process of becoming—a Super State.
There was a clear ascension marked, a life journey for a people to make, and a focus to keep. Goodness would be swelling inside the end product, of course, sealed inside by the liberal ethos—the biblical benevolence impulse that's latent in every human being, resurrected when freed of outside worries and survival contrivances. Oh, the glorious time that'll be! Living in the Super State, it was to be. Heaven on Earth!
But did Poke Salad Annie serve up sumpthin' to us good 'ol folks that hadn't been boiled good yet? I now wonder at times. Something happened, for sure; we never got there to that place.
Say, after the Berlin Wall came down (during those years maybe), whatever swept over the world sure left us increasingly divisive. Fighting each other. Our diverse immigrant-made country was supposed to be a Melting Pot, not a fractious Crock Pot, mates!
If that period marked the beginning of our noticeable decline (or rather, if you want to argue, not our falling from grace but simply one of other countries catching up to us), then look at the figures now.
We're # 1, of course, in our total debt to other countries. That's a given. CNN's global public square website moved the story March 4 from a Swiss institution showing the U.S. has slipped in many other areas as well—i.e., to being the 4th most competitive country in the world; only the 5th best place to run a company (thanks to union wages and unending regulations); 23rd in infrastructure; 41st in infant mortality; and 49th in life expectancy. And yet we have the world's largest economy! Moving toward becoming a Super State, it is?!! Hardly.
Among the latest theories is that we've moved now toward breaking apart into separate, power centers—regional super states, if you will—where cultural similarities are more important in driving trade than the design of the national flag mounted outside of buildings; and thus have become the common overriding values that define its regional citizens as well. Think of such trade centers as Hong Kong and Southern China; or the 17 “autonomous communities” of Spain. And you might even tag such hot international trade spots as San Diego-Tijuana/El Paso-Juarez for such future designations also.
This ground-moving change is emerging in the wake of—and perhaps as a result of--what some political scientists are calling the actual demise of the so-called Nation State era now, where the U.S. was the big name for so long, but is beginning to appear more and more in other countries' rear-view mirrors now.
Kenichi Ohmae, for instance, respected author of The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies a few years back, states boldly that what the future holds most "is not really which party or policy agenda dominates...Nor is it the number of new, independent units into which that old center, which has held through the upheavals of industrialization and the agonies of two world wars, is likely to decompose (into)...Nor is it the cultural fault lines along which it is likely to fragment.
"...What we are witnessing is the cumulative effect of fundamental changes in the currents of economic activity around the globe. So powerful have these currents become that they have carved out entirely new channels for themselves--channels that owe nothing to the lines of demarcation on traditional political maps. Put simply, in terms of real flows of economic activity, nation states have already lost their role as meaningful units of participation in the global economy of today's borderless world."
And, yes, you betcha, I have a problem with such autonomous channel arrangements. Where do social values fit in? Is free thought, expression, allowed in such arrangements? Or is communication scripted? Is this the doorstep to the age of the automatons? That classy looking young woman who passed this ol' slow country boy on the highway the other day, without even a glimpse sideways, ...Was she already IN one of those states? Then what's the criteria for my having been left out? Was the decision democratic?
Robots don't cry, do they? In one of these introspection spells like this, I often think of my late uncle, A. J. Casey. He was a big, tough career Marine. When at a ball park during the national anthem—or gosh, even when sometimes passing a school during a flag-raising—Uncle A. J. would pop to attention to honor the U.S. flag. He fought for that! His heart was wrapped in it. And then he'd cry.
The classy woman in the sporty car, however, would never've noticed. Not even the flag. Tick-tock...
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Maybe the question we should be asking is who is controlling those powerful streams that are redrawing the map of the world? They obviously can't do it alone, so would the next question be -- who are their hired guns?
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