We Are Not Getting What We Need
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Politics, Future, Culture, History, Change

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 26. 2020

We are watching a world disappear and a universe transformed before our eyes. For many of us on this planet, the world we knew so well has been fading away over the last ten months. We thought it was falling into the fog from the pandemic, and the sun would soon burn off the haze. But the sun is lighting a different world that is far stranger than we are prepared to accept.

What was a time of anger and anxiety threatened by insecurity, growing poverty, and oppression for many held at bay by illusion has lost its camouflage. Things that were minimized and ignored are now blatant with no pretense of past normality.

The return to the old normal was supposed to happen quickly for the Trump disaster in America, Brexit in Great Britain, and for us all with a vaccine for COVID. But it hasn’t, and it won’t. We know that now, except for the main media commentators paid to maintain the pretense that the old world just went on hold and would soon return.

The wait has stretched beyond concern into fear of even more disasters. What is coming back is far uglier than we thought. We realized that what we thought was difficult and frightening was much worse than we were allowed to know.

That is a different order of problem. There is no firm place to stand. We can realize lies about the future, or we can discover lies about our past, and there is still some foundation. But simultaneously understanding that we have been lied to about our past and our future leaves us floundering in a sea of change.

The pandemic has destroyed our already failing economy just as we were learning our economy’s complete unsustainability. Refusing to accept the massiveness of the COVID-19 pandemic by weak governments was stupid and multiplied the complex layers of that disaster. By failing to learn the lessons of change and reducing malign production to save our planet, unquestionably restoring that economy's worst elements lies about our future.

In America, the struggle to remove a seriously mentally ill criminal dedicated to greed and fascism took four years. That it also exacerbated the pandemic's disaster with four hundred thousand deaths in the US alone and continues to destroy the last pretense of continuity in the proposal of representative government for the US is a stunning realization. No wonder so many frantically denies this.

That the political denialists are falling rapidly silent is the sign of that realization. As the numbers shrink, danger increases as desperation for believed lies drive people to violence. As much as we would like to believe that people learn from their mistakes, many will now search for ways to prove they weren’t fools and were right all along. For self-defining beliefs, two lies equal one truth no matter how egregious the lies. Only the number counts.

For America, the only allowed means of removing Trump was to declare only superficial changes and abandonment of open criminality. That reducing the public health murder rate and abandoning open criminality is the only thing needed to repair a failing economy and collapsing political system qualifies as a minimalist solution.

That it is no solution to the structural failures spreading through the extreme capitalist world while paying only lip service to the need for conversion to a truly democratic system and sustainable economy explains the failure in anxiety reduction for most people planetwide. Somehow an aging police state institutionalist, however pleasant, seems wrong probably because it is.

The wrong person's uncanny similarity with the wrong goals has reached a spectacularly unsatisfactory end in Great Britain. The Brexit trade agreement, such as it is, will accelerate an economic decline already so much worse because of COVID.

Due to generational change, the majority of voters would prefer to forget the whole Brexit disaster, but that was not an option. The only positive is reducing the deadly capitalist economy in Great Britain, but that is not the goal. Predatory capitalism will need to be whipped into a shambling run to save the wretched economy.

Our need is a fast turn toward community responsibility and ownership to promote local produce and minimal production of unneeded goods and services. Billions of people have learned that we can get by with much less destruction of our environment. Technology makes it possible to work more intelligently and remotely, learn more effectively and remotely, and have a more rewarding life. We need to remove the cycle of capitalist greed feeding a tiny elite that devastates the planet and destroys itself, along with millions of people, every four to seven years.

The goal is to make this the last planetary capitalist collapse as it is already the worst. That is not a minimalist change. We know this. Why do we accept befuddled and minimalist political rule?