The human animal is a damfoolish creature. Take our own country. American vegetable producers and fruit growers have long complained that they do not have enough laborers to harvest their beans and berries. They are forced to throw a lot of it away. Can’t get it sold.
Simultaneously, our president blocks at our southern border thousands of willing workers who are desperate for work. Our stalwart leader has proclaimed that “America is full.”
It’s a preposterous statement. America is empty. If you don’t believe it, take a drive coast to coast, particularly west of the Mississippi River. The highways are empty. Meanwhile, 85% of all Americans are cramped tightly together in large cities. In between are many long-forgotten abandoned small communities.
Empty wasted space. Wasted people. All because of stupid corporate profit obsession and overconsumption.
Millions of acres of non-park land, perfectly suitable as property to live on, are kept off the real estate market by land speculators so they can manipulate pricing and make more money as 13 million unemployed are faced with potential eviction, as tens of thousands of Americans are literally homeless.
Meanwhile, multibillionaires like Mr. Bezos and Mr Musk spend substantial chunks of their profits speculating in real estate. That is, when they’re not proposing we move a bunch of us to Mars. What a grotesque idea.
What could we possibly do on Mars? We can’t even manage the Earth’s climate, the millions of homeless refugees. And our empty country’s leader blusters that we are full!
Some 13 million unemployed Americans face potential eviction now. Many large corporations’ employees commonly work 45 – 50 hour weeks. Large corporate leaders don’t have the intellectual vision to lower that to 30 hours, free-up work by training unemployed, and sharing the jobs with them.
The new incomes and spending of the presently unemployed would immediately rebalance the lowered consumption of the nose-to-the-grindstone-obsessed, 45 hour-per-week corporate work slaves.
Remarkably, the pandemic’s interruption to our wasteful consumption habits has awarded us far cleaner air and water. And people have actually been saving money. Conceivably, some of them may even have realized how stupid our addiction to wasteful over-consumption is.
America could literally take a fraction of our unused empty land and assign ownership of a housing lot to every American citizen who doesn’t have a place to live, and there would still be millions of acres of free land.
We could use it to create new small specialty manufacturing communities to produce high quality products for the world. We could use it to create the answers to many needs we have long recognized but bluntly ignored.
We could replace the retail spending focus of our GDP (gross domestic product) with new service industries: climate change experts, national child care for working mothers, ocean cleanup of plastic waste, vastly speeded up solar and wind energy installation. The list of vitally needed things is endless.
We humans, and Americans, are not just ridiculous. We have become outright stupid. We are hypnotized with invalid assumptions. We could double, triple, and quadruple our population and we’d still have millions of free acres of land.
America could take in every refuge immigrant on the planet, using millions of unused acres of land to house them and create the new service and specialty communities with the manufacturing and service jobs.
The key to it working would be to consciously acknowledge one simple undeniable fact. That the solution to our own needy people, and the worldwide refugee millions, is to stop assigning value to mindless consumption and, instead, begin to place economic value on people.
Replace over-consumption with sharing work and income.
The disenfranchised refugees and homeless of the world are our potential to replace mindless consumption of totally unnecessary items as the basis of our economy with the life supporting needs of the human race in order to safeguard our species.
What’s blocking us? Our ridiculousness. Our damfoolish stupidity. How do we bring a new renaissance about? It’s rather simple. Turn our stupid switch off and our smart switch on.
It can all be done by beginning to use that grey stuff right between our ears again. It’s the only solution, actually. We can start using common sense and our brain’s real capacity again. Or face the consequences.
We are gradually and increasingly losing it. We are dead asleep in the head while we act out every emotion engorging our bodies . If we don’t wake up soon and stop playing the fool, the troubles we are presently causing are going to quickly seem like horseplay.
