Third Worlding
I was driving home from New Jersey last night. I passed gas stations advertising fuel at $4.15 and climbing, decrepit powerlines criss-crossing the fields, Wal-Marts killing small businesses and the landscape, front yards advertising homes for sale and SUVs for sale and cars and boats and anything else for sale, dead and dying malls along the Black Horse Pike, finally taking a sharp left onto the over-worked and under-maintained Atlantic City Expressway, I had the distinct feeling that I live in what will soon be a Third World country. I was reminded of all those pictures I’ve seen of the breakaway Soviet Republics, all tied to obsolete and inefficient technology, with corrupt leadership that does nothing for the people and hoards everything for itself.
As I crossed the Walt Whitman Bridge into Philadelphia, and watched the sun, which was bright red thanks to all the carbon monoxide in the air, sink over the skyline, I wondered why we can’t have what other countries have: national health care; marriage equality; economic justice; a smaller gap between the have and the have nots; clean, renewable energy; and good jobs. And then I remembered. I live in what will soon be a Third World Country.
What an embarrassment.
One Response to “Third Worlding”
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July 11th, 2008 at 6:23 am
That’s actually my (admittedly half-baked) theory: the goal of the fuck-you-rich minority controlling the government and its increasingly-strangled media-aided political distract-a-thon (divide and conquer, anyone?) is precisely to turn the US into a third world country. When everybody is poor, we become that much easier to rule/suppress/control. We are all too busy bickering about gay marriage, black presidents, illegal immigrants, flag pendants, Britney’s dingy pastrami noodle, the fucking Red Sox, etc. to notice or care about the rapid erosion of everything that once safeguarded our freedom and ability to merely make do — screw the idea of getting ahead. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Keep gobbling up those hot buttons. Keep finding ways to hate the other crumbsuckers around you. Keep watching America’s Next Top Distraction. Keep forgetting that everything — fuel, mortgages, the environment — is already beyond repair. Keep losing sight of who is the real fucking enemy.