April 05, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE

One of my favorite books is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. You have the image of wide open spaces and good roads to take you wherever you want to go. Increasingly, however, U. S. infrastructure like roads and bridges and sewer systems is crumbling. Sometimes the consequences are deadly, such as the levees breaching in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Another effect of dilapidated schools and other infrastructure is an increasingly difficult time competing in the world economy. This column by Bob Herbert is at www.welcometopottersville.com:

Blackouts, school buildings in advanced states of disrepair, decrepit highway and railroad bridges — the American infrastructure is growing increasingly old and obsolete. In addition to being an invitation to tragedy, this is a problem that is putting Americans at a disadvantage in the ever more competitive global economy.

Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker who helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s, has been prominent among those trying to sound the infrastructure alarm. Along with former Senator Warren Rudman, he has been criticizing the government’s unwillingness to invest adequately in public transportation systems, water projects, dams, schools, the electrical grid, and so on.

He recently told a House committee that Congress should begin a major effort to rebuild the American infrastructure “before it is too late.”

LOOKING AT "THE SECRET"

Pop culture has been a part of U. S. life for a long time. It was things like Davy Crockett's coonskin cap or the hula hoop. It was the mood ring. It was the pet rock. These days there's a book called "The Secret," which sounds very much like the old power of positive thinking psychology. The idea is that if you think positive thoughts positive things will happen to you. As the author points out here, that doesn't hold up very well when you look at the millions of impoverished people in the world. There's a big difference between fantasy and reality. This article by Carolyn Baker is at www.onlinejournal.com:

In Sibling Society (1996), Robert Bly astutely, in my opinion, describes American culture as one of children who have never matured into adulthood and where “adults cling to self-absorbed adolescent values, television talk shows have more clout than elders, children are spiritually abandoned to fend for themselves, and in the place of community we have built shopping malls.”

I can think of no more apt description of The Secret than this, for it is first and foremost all about me and what I want.

Only children and adolescents believe that they can, as The Secret insists, have anything they want. Rhonda Byrne of Prime Time Productions, one of the principal filmmakers and author of the book The Secret, says she was inspired by reading “The Science Of Getting Rich,” a 1910 book by Wallace D. Wattles, a New Thought transcendentalist, which proclaims that one’s wealth or lack thereof is a product of one’s thought and attitudes. Positive thinking attracts good things; negative thinking attracts lack.

When I hear these concepts, I can only return to: How uniquely American! Can you imagine telling 12 year-old girls in Chinese sweatshops -- the ones who work 16 hours a day for pennies, live in squalor, may get raped at any moment, and sometimes are found dead at the ripe old age of 20 at their sewing machines from working themselves to death -- can you imagine telling them that their situation is the product of their thoughts? Examples of such ghastly human suffering are countless in a world where millions of human beings live on less than two dollars a day.