American media’s job is not to define and guide the anticipated strategic path of our nation. Nor is it to manage the current worldwide diaspora of millions of people.
However, we may safely propose that both constitute an appropriate job for the world’s foremost economic and military power.
United States’ policy regarding the relentless scattering of people about the globe, and the vexing issue of nature’s climate change, quite obviously will meaningfully influence the approaching future of both our country and all people of the planet.
Therefore, it is rational for us to reassess the collective mindset of the American people. That is, to inspect if and how we and our elected representatives share a common vision of life goals . . . or not.
What indeed is the internalized philosophy of all elected officials regarding their responsibility for the financial condition of all Americans? Even all people?
Most all politicians and we citizens work for corporations or our incomes depend upon them. Corporations own almost everything on the earth and presently sit on billions, if not trillions, of dollars of accumulated cash profits.
Politicians and corporate executives actively promote them. Ninety percent of us, whether leaning left or right, are able to earn our keep from this economic system.
A stumbling block exists, however, to our ability to equitably share the planet’s wealth with all people. It is the combination of our eyeing our personal existence as our primary life goal rather than jointly embracing a more comprehensive worldview.
If we would envision financially recovering the worldwide ten percent who are presently denied participation in our planetary economy, it would enlarge our total consumer base and moderate our antagonistically self-imposed political and economic apartheid.
Our clear opportunity now is to moderate any further promotion of our near-sighted consumer appetite for luxury, but rather to collaboratively elevate the last tenth of humanity excluded from our civilization, and to substantially improve their education.
Our prevailing self-imposed economic philosophy is no longer viable. Each of us aiming in our life’s work the maximum accumulation of personal wealth is not a model designed to sustain our species long-term.
Enough worldly wealth exists to insure all of us receive sustainable income. All that is lacking is the intellectual will to collectively envision a more rational goal than just our individual personal security.
The long-term security of our entire species is really what’s at stake. Our individual security depends on our recognizing this and managing our lives with the full assurance that each of us focusing from the perspective of our species will secure our individual security.
This is not an idealistic utopian objective. It is a realistic one. Collectively assuming responsibility for ourselves as a species will create a better functioning planet-wide society. We seem quite capable of collectively envisioning religious dogma. Why should we not be equally capable of better envisioning our tangible reality?
Journalism would play a key role in creating this model of human behavior. Reporters free of biased financial philosophies reveal truths commonly hidden from us. Journalism keenly attuned to scientific method is vital to our existence. Is there a key obstacle that prevents this mental refinement? I believe so.
It is the “militarization” of the various nation’s economies. Intellectually it’s simple. If nations’ governments continue to incentivize their economic militarization with profits, instead of working to collaboratively replace them with a species’ survival attitude, we all live on a razor’s edge of existence.
Nations spend trillions of dollars annually building weapons of mass destruction. Warring is generally accepted as a means to resolve political differences. It is our Achille’s heel. Our own country’s plan to spend billions on revitalizing nuclear weapons and a space force is our current contribution to this shallow way of thinking.
These funds spent instead on promoting a worldwide collaboration of nations defining collectively how to go about diverting their military labor, resources, and capital to sustaining the entire world’s population would obviously produce the improved economic condition of all people.
Journalism may not have the responsibility to execute such a plan. But it does hold the potential of being able to create the worldwide intellectual atmosphere for such a collective planetary vision to emerge and develop.
Not gambling on blowing ourselves up with our cavalier attitude toward nuclear power seems to me to be a reasonably acceptable alternative to our predominantly religion-based militant governments.
All those trillions of military dollars redistributed to all citizens of the planet by sharing with them jobs to manage the change, would most certainly improve the lot of everybody.
If the world’s capitalists really believe in their system, should they not want to enlarge their market by ten percent? Should they not want to help recover their forgotten potential customers?
