Americans will share a regret about recent mistake

We are in the midst of a systemic breakdown, a breakdown to the economy, politics, healthcare, education, etc. Such breakdowns always occur at the end of eras, when one epoch gives way to another. Such are the times in which we live.

We just love our big picture.

Are these breakdowns? Is the economy breaking down? Unemplyoment and underemployment on the current scale has been going on for decades. Forty percent of Americans have never been secure. The top forty percent are doing just fine. This is the way a natural system operates. If we want an unnatural, somehow kinder economy, we risk the loss of the spirit of enterprise.

Healthcare is not broken. Prosperous, successful Americans have very good healthcare. Americans have never been promised a free ride. That's a European concept.

Education is not broken. American education is better than ever. It's the bottom thirty percent that suffers, as always. Take a ride through south central and tell me how to fix it. You can't.

Politics is no more broken today than it has ever been. It has alway been deeply flawed, as the 2000 election proves, as the silly electoral college and royalistic Senate suggests, as voting in late fall, with no holiday indicates. 100,000 voters had to wait for up to seven hours and finally left, deciding they couldnt pay that high a poll tax.



Etc?

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

This time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes -- and a resolute new consensus about what to do.

Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes. What mistakes? Was the Civil War inevitible or a mistake? Were the American Revolution or the twin emergencies of the thirties and forties mistakes?


It's a foolish desire to imagine that the unavoidable might have been avoided, if mistakes had not been made. We muddle through. There are no leaders, only managers. There's a book The Myth of Leadership.

But believe me, I have no opinion on this. I am just laying out a few options.

Resolute new consensus about what to do? Nobody knows what to do.

This is poetry, not economics.