Sense & sensibility

Greetings good citizen,

What is the sound of one hand clapping? (Depending on how you do it, it is pretty much the same sound two hands make, only softer…)

If such questions are even intended to have ‘practical’ answers…

Which, naturally, depends on who is doing the asking…

I’m going ‘meta’ tonight partly due to my recent ‘close encounter’ and partly due to my renewed sense of skepticism that ‘recovery’ has anything to do with things returning to ‘normal’.

I could ‘concede’ the economy ‘recovering’ as long as the pundits made it abundantly clear that ‘recovery’ had nothing to do with things returning to ‘normal’.

And even that isn’t enough…because ‘not losing’ doesn’t count as ‘winning’ no matter how you slice it. You can’t shed ten million jobs and declare victory just because the ‘bleeding’ stopped! Those ten million workers didn’t just dry up and blow away, never to be seen or heard from again…that’s not how it works, in fact its never worked that way.

Perhaps even more perplexing is how the powerful can even delude themselves into thinking this planet can sustain the ‘western lifestyle’ on a planet-wide basis…because that’s what they’re trying to do!

The ‘middle classes’ of emerging nations are buying the ‘dream’ as sold to them by the world’s financial markets…the house, the cars and the private schools for the kiddies…don’t forget the vacations and that other ‘must have’, the vacation home!

It was pathetic enough when the Western world started following the ‘greed track’, financed by ever increasing lines of credit, but now we have spread the same disease to the developing world! (Because TV has given viewers the false impression that the people of the developed world are like the people they see in sitcoms, rather than the sad truth.) The people in the developed world are a lot more like the folks portrayed on cop shows than the ones you see in sitcoms.

Which leads us back to the issue of who are these madmen and what the hell are they thinking? On one hand we know they THINK they are going to follow their money to the newly created ‘enclaves’ of wealth within the emerging global economies.

But that’s not going to work out real well if an exploding global population is sucking up resources faster than they can be harvested…and as the numbers tell us, the emerging economies have major issues with keeping their populations in check…

It’s this sort of ‘short-sightedness’ that’s becoming a bit difficult to swallow no matter who dishes it out. Oh, and the ‘conservative’ morons are precisely the ones who are ignoring the sustainability issue. They firmly (albeit falsely) believe there’s plenty of everything to go around.

And they’re right! Just as long as only those who deserve to enjoy the benefits of civil society are the ONLY ones those benefits are bestowed upon…but even that number is becoming ‘too large’…but we have digressed to that ‘one hand clapping’ question we started with.

And you’ll only succeed in driving yourself crazy if you spend too much time pondering question that don’t have good answers…like the ones the pundits keep spewing!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner