Malaise

The flu (mine- proceeded by my daughter’s) and cruddy weather have kept me indoors and on the trainer. All that sitt’n and spin’n gives one time to think.

Today I watched a documentary on the Amish as I was peddling along. It got me to thinking about how out of control the typical modern American life has become. The day after a tornado rips down an Amish barn a clean-up crew of neighbors, family and friends arrives on the scene. Two weeks later the cows have a new home – a job is in need of getting done, and the community simply pitches in a does it. Compare that to the typical Joe down the road who lost his garage in the same storm. After he finally squeezes a few bucks out of the insurance company he has to gather bids, find contractors – maybe they show, maybe they don’t and twelve months later, if he’s lucky, he has a place to put that four wheel contraption, which he probably knows very little about how to repair and maintain.

It’s no wonder that so many Americans are so pissed off. We speak incessantly on irreparable phones which we have no idea of how, when, where or by whom they were made. We depend totally on automobiles that burn an unsustainable resource while at the same time maintaining a healthy ignorance of the internal combustion engine. Our jobs are tenuous, our homes leveraged, our bank accounts drained. How many Americans can grow a carrot much less raise a cow? We have no control over our everyday lives - this produces malaise - malaise ignites anger.

I think many Americans are waking up to the fact that the bank owns their house, their car, their four-wheeler, their snowmobile. They see that they are a single paycheck away from losing the entire house of cards. The next step is to look for someone to blame. Lord knows they can’t look in a mirror. Blame the President, the immigrants, the gays, the feminists; the blowhards have no shortage of places to point their chubby little fingers. Many are happy to follow that index finger, so long as it doesn’t point to them.