I've been watching some geopolitical strategists on YouTube. They seem to be expecting a collapse of the global world order. This means they need to flood North America with fresh labor to compensate for the loss of global labor or inefficiency of doing business in a war-torn international climate. Also, the demographics are bad in the first world. Low birth rates and an aging population.
I would not be surprised if the present culture was engineered to quell any dissent over the new immigration policies.
Don't go to college and you'll be drowned in the flood of third world labor that has been allowed to invade the country. This is not the 1950's. You aren't going to graduate high school and support a family as a travelling shoe salesman. You're going to end up working next to Jorge in some dead end minimum wage job and spending most of your money on rent.
Saying that it's a choice is a form of gaslighting. For most people, not going means a life of brutal wage slavery and exploitation. I guess you would say it's a choice to live as well?
i didn't do college and i ended up in a pretty nice position. House paid for, car paid for, rv paid for, plenty of money for food /bills / fun. Could i have ended up in an even better position? maybe, but i could have ended up worse too.
I had some crap jobs sure, but i got the experience to move up and on. Call centers, warehouse jobs, tech support - ended up a system administrator without any class work or even any certs.
There is nothing wrong with the blue collar jobs either, they tend to make more money after 4 years experience than a recent college grad. And lots of them end up being their own boss!
You're the one speaking like we're living in another time. A time where people were freer and there was more economic opportunity. 40% of Americans don't even have $1000 in savings. It's a wildly dysfunctional and oppressive system and you're engaging in gaslighting because you benefit from it.
This attitude is the product of an insanely competitive and violent environment. People have learned that this is how you have to be to make it to the top. Also, what's the fun of being rich if nobody else is poor? The lower the low, the higher the high. People enjoy feeling the power of crushing others. Putting your boot on the throat of the weak makes you feel intoxicatingly strong. I'm convinced this is why the rich turn to philanthropy. Instead of helping make a system where the poor and needy don't exist, they rather make charities that transmute their greed into benevolence. There's some truly sick psychological stuff going on in this country.
The game was rigged to begin with. Individuals can't make sound choices within this insanely dysfunctional system. You can work hard, be the greatest model citizen, and still end up in a horrible place due to circumstances beyond your control.
We've seen whole cities become apocalyptic wastelands due to unfathomable economic crises.
I firmly believe no one can make sense of this unprincipled chaos. We call ourselves a capitalist country, but goods produced by a communist country dominate our market. Wtf? Just one of the many naked paradoxes that people seem to ignore and continue on like everything is normal. We're beyond the point of making sense of this mess. None of it makes sense, none of it fair. It's organized anarchy.
You choose homeostasis. Feeeling good about the future makes you feel good. This leads to immediate improvements in one's quality of life. People are attracted to those who have a "positive outlook." No one likes hanging around a doomsayer.
This author clearly lives in a place where he can afford such optimism. It's not so easy in the slums of Tanzania.
I believe feeling good about the future with many specific reasons to feel good about the future is totally valid though.
Ask yourself why people in the slums of Tanzania might not be "optimistic about the future". Is it because of their poor current living situation, or is it because they don't see as much of the political, scientific, and social progress being made over time globally? I'd argue it's more likely the latter.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future. No one does. I don't have all the facts. And even if I did, I would need a galaxy brain to integrate them all into an outlook. Not everything is publicized. There are many groups of people who work to further their own agendas. We aren't one globe, one humanity. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't reflect reality.
I base my pessimism on the childishness I see flourishing in adults who have lost contact with reality because they've never endured serious hardship. These people can be easily manipulated because they have little fear. They have never made life or death decisions. So they don't understand the significance of forming an accurate model of the world. The result is a nation full of dreamers. Such people are ill adapted to the real world and will naturally be ineffective in all that they do.
There are very strong incentives for forming an optimistic outlook. None of these are conditioned on data or serious consideration. I think people look for reasons to justify how they want to feel. In other words, optimism precedes the reasons one has for being optimistic.
Voltaire lampooned optimism very well in Candide. His ultimate conclusion was: don't waste your time on idealistic notions of a world in which terrible things are always happening; instead, tend to your garden--do your best to improve what you can and no more. This is a wise suggestion. Optimism and pessimism are both traps. They are pathological extensions of present conditions.
It's called "class warfare." America isn't one nation: it's a hierarchy of classes. The managerial/administrative class is superior to the proletarian educator class in the hierarchy. They don't want to listen to what teachers have to say just like a baron didn't want to listen to what his peasants think. They are seen as a highly redundant exploitable resource, thus they are disposable.
The author feels all these things, but she can't properly interpret them because she's still under the spell that there's good faith at the top, that we are one nation trying to work together the best we can. She would have to believe this to maintain her self-worth as a pillar of the system. If she didn't, she would lose faith in the significance of her job. She would see herself as a conditioner of slaves, not as one who enlightens the lives of others with knowledge. Once she loses this faith, she'll either become a dead, dispirited teacher, or she'll quit. Right now, she's in the twilight zone between idealism and jaded realism.
The inequality and unfairness is not a bug: it's a feature of the class system. In order for the high to live like demigods, we must be trodden under foot to level the field for their opulent lives. They can't live as they live if we aren't forced to live as we live. It we weren't constantly in fear of losing our jobs and ending up on the street, to openly die as passersby mock us, reaffirming the value of compliance in their minds, we wouldn't endure the hardships we suffer. We wouldn't work for minimum wage. We wouldn't consent to clearly unfair exploitation. But since utter ruin and death is the consequence of refusal, we keep running along and comfort ourselves with a whole host of delusions and distractions that make us feel better about our servitude.
There will be no empathy from those who build their dreams upon our nightmares.
Get in a car accident -> hurt back -> prescribed opiates -> get addicted -> prescription stops -> seek street alternatives -> move up the food chain, from buying pills to fentanyl -> lose everything -> end up on the street
Loved one dies -> super depressed -> looking to numb the pain -> starts drinking heavily at bars -> exposed to the drug scene -> offered a bump of cocaine one day -> feels good -> start to do cocaine -> coke dealer has fentanyl to -> you try it -> on the street
Get out of the military -> racked with PTSD -> suicidal -> being around consumerist Americans who know nothing of danger or the dark side of life is alienating -> feeling all alone -> same as loved one dies pipeline -> on the street in a tent draped with the American flag.
There are also ones like:
Irresponsible teenager -> raised in single mother household -> no good role models -> raised by T.V. -> doesn't known how to navigate the world -> ends up in a minimum wage job -> everyone there is doing drugs because their life is so bleak (I've seen this personally)-> nothing to look forward to -> most of pay goes to rent -> feel trapped and abused -> confused, doesn't know how this happened -> does drugs like his coworkers because he feels disposable -> starts fucking up on the job -> no more willingness to keep working -> on the street, begging for his fix.
*Idealistic middle class college grad -> going to save the world -> faces the world -> crippling despair -> can't fix this mess -> hopeless -> give up and drop out -> ×_× drug scene to street.
There are many more pipelines.
It's not simply a "drug problem." There are a lot of pipelines that inevitably lead people there. Once people end up there, they are typically very hard to fix because they have been knocked out of the standard career pipeline. Who wants to hire an ex homeless person with a huge job gap? They feel hopeless, like there's not a place for them anymore in society. Once you've accepted this, you stare long into the abyss. With that comes a great deal of trauma. Making these people very unstable, unlike ordinary citizens who have never danced along the knife's edge. This gives them a bad reputation because you can give them a job and home, but they will often keep going back to their old ways. They are broken inside and a job and house won't fix what has happened to them.
Source: I binge watch documentaries on this issue and read about it.
