“This Quarter” - The American Dream? 05.03.
People seem to jump overboard when they get it in their heads that they want something, and they go ahead and sign contracts, getting involved in something they can’t understand or don’t care about, and when they don’t like it they think they can dump it. I see it in the case of cell phones all the time…
Americans (and other people) only want what they want when they want it the majority of the time, it seems. Just look at the stock market. Everything is oriented at short-term, no one has the attention span to think about CONSUQENCES.
“This Quarter…” Dear god, those two words, paired with the contemporary blackness of the word “recession”, are helping to kill this nation. All people care about is themselves, and short-term profit; it seems that faith and pride in your business you invest in and dedication to something you are bound too are nonexistent nowadays; if a few people sell stock at a high profit, soon everyone dumps it. We self-replicate panic by trying to gain a few quick bucks.
Led Zeppelin probably didn’t mean to be so revolutionary as to say “No Quarter”, but imagine a world where people aren’t trying any means of swindling to reach odds and ends meet by the end of the quarter.
Our housing market is in so much crap lately… and why? A few big investment firms thought it’d be cute to finance a house for $300,000 for people who’s annual income is less than $40,000.
Capitalistic idiociticy, it is driving us to recession. This is why. The few rich in the world have seen the American dream, and continue to offer it to us just to slap it back out of our hands. It’s like the middle and lower class Americans are walking slowly up an escalator the wrong way financially. Whether in housing, oil, whatever… the American dream is being used against it’s own citizens.
On the flipside, you have technology advancing at alarming rates; yet the power grid (telephone poles etc) is out of date by many decades. Same for gasoline, the law for the level of sulfur in gas being reduced is set to go through in 2010; we still use gas anyway? And now, most disturbingly, ISPs want to limit bandwidth to pay-per-kb/mb/gb, as some have already switched to. People, this is what DEVELOPING countries use. Why don’t the ISPs upgrade their equipment? Look at youtube, look at myspace, and most of all look at big online games like WoW. Of course you’re going to have people who hog the bandwidth if you don’t upgrade or charge per kb/mb/gb/etc. They think that charging per gb will change anything? No, think of all the money they will loose from the people who pay $40-$500 for internet conection and only check their emails with it, netting a whopping 100mb/year? It’s sheer laziness.
The American dream was such a great idea at one time; now it only means, I get what I want, and screw everyone else. “This Quarter”, we might need to all sit down and re-evaluate the world around us. Fuck, we’re living in it and making it, and it’s making us… whatever it is making us.
Take 10 minutes away from your busy schedule, Americans, and think for a few minutes, outside the box. Playing in the box, working for the box, and modifying the box are no good. Think outside it.