Hi! Jay,
Cynicism "is" fear. It is one manifestation of or response to fear.
I think we are losing something that possibly we may never have had in
the first place, a commitment to the soil of this country. I once lived
in the Arab section of Brooklyn, New York. The owner of my building was
from Yehmen. We became good friends and we invited each other for
dinner. One day he was talking about doing business in the U.S. He said
that the U.S. was just a place to do business, but when you have made
your money, then you go home. I don't know if he ever returned to
Yehmen -- I doubt it-- but never felt that this adopted country was
home for him.
I think that, as we are encouraged to become more and more isolated
from each other, we will become innured to increasingly higher levels
of violence, social inequality, and political domination by a small
political-economic elite. The value of individualism that is being
screemed at us by the political Right is essentially a justification
of the legitimacy of the political-economic elite. We are in an even
more McLuanesque world today than when McLuan was alive, and we don't
recognize how our lives have been changed. We accept globalism as
inevitable, the non-education of our children as something over which
we have no control, the control of the national media over the agenda
of issues with which people are concerned.
What is the consequence for people who lose emotional bonds with their
community? Ray Harrell has discussed this with respect to Native
American cultures. It was said to me once by someone that the only
thing that holds us together as a people is The Constitution. The one
thing that has always characterized the uniqueness of the American
culture is our attachments to civic organizations of all kinds. What is
disappearing is our essence as Americans.
Jay, it is you who use that quote from Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor
about people's acquiescence to slavery as long as they feel fed. We are
being encouraged to accept illusion as reality, and by the time people
wake up to what has happened to them, there will be nothing they can do
to reclaim what they lost, and I suspect they will not know what it is
they lost. Corporate feudalism is advancing rapidly with all it
concomitant violence and terror.
Hugh McGuire
Hugh McGuire
Jay Hanson wrote:
>
>From: Hugh McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
>>The following is an article in today's Christian Science Monitor. It
>>describes how people are not participating in community organizations
>>any longer. Robert Putnam of Harvard thinks it is because people
prefer
>>their television sets and computers to actual human interaction. I
>>think it is because people are afraid of interacting with other
people.
>>The politics, the conformity, cliqueishness, and the fear of
rejection
>>all combine to influence our profound isolation from each other.
>
>You missed the obvious answer: cynicism. Why should people donate
time and
>money to hold their community together so some asshole CEO can buy
himself
>another Lear Jet?
>
>Seen in this light, "participating in community organizations" looks
like
>another form of corporate welfare.
>
>Jay -- www.dieoff.com
>
>
