How did we get here?

Sometimes I feel like I see the world very differently from most other people. I think that I've always been a fish out of water is some way. My whole life I've run into people on a daily basis talking about, looking for, or acquiring things that really don't make very much sense to me. I think there are a great many people that feel the same way I do but more often I think the we are greatly outnumbered. Did you know that somewhere between 25 and 35 million people watch American Idol every week? Apparently there are that many people that find this kind of thing entertaining. It sounds to me like 35 million hours wasted.

But this is our culture. Entertainment. If it's not entertaining then, inevitably, it fails. We demand that our news be entertaining which is why we almost never hear the happy stories, but the disturbing or sad stories. It is why our news media spends so much time fabricating, creating, and forcing the news. We demand that our dining experiences be entertaining and so most Americans eat most of their meals in flashy restaurants that all serve the same flashy, and tasteless, food. We spend a huge amount of ours lives working at jobs where we are creating something entertaining for someone else so that we can go out and buy entertaining things from someone else who will then use the money to go buy something entertaining and then we'll all meet at the lake once a month and talk about the new truck that is pulling the new boat. People all over the world are starving, or can't find clean water to drink, or have nowhere warm to sleep.

But don't worry, we have Shrek and Spiderman to take our minds off of it. They only cost a few hundred million dollars to make. They'll only bring in somewhere around a billion dollars before it's all said and done. Oh but before we go see that movie this weekend we should write a letter to our congressman and try to force all these illegals out. We don't want them draining money out of the system. Send them back to Mexico! Why worry about who's going to put the roof on the house, harvest the food from the fields so it can go to our Supermarket, butcher our meat, work in our factories, restaurants, hotels, and pretty much any other industry you can think of? Who's going to do these jobs when they can't get into the country? They will. What we'll do is export all of this work so that we can pay them a fraction of the price and still get our entertaining goods extra cheap. Thanks Wal-Mart!

But they're a burden to the system! But they're stealing American jobs! But we'll have to let them become eligible for all of the things that we get! It's not fair! I don't want to share! Why not. We already have a great many people living on our welfare system. I'm not really convinced that they are a burden to the system. Most of them are just looking for a job that pays well. Don't you think that if these employers could get Americans to do the work then they probably would? I do. It seems a lot simpler than hiring illegals and trying to keep anyone from trying to find out. Why don't they. I can only assume that Americans won't work for what these employers are willing to pay. Why won't they? Because they can only pay so much becuase they have to keep the product cheap becuase if they don't then they won't be able to sell it because wal-mart or target or any of the other discount stores will just buy it from someone else, someone in a foreign country, who can legally pay their employees two dollars a day or something in that ballpark. But hey, at least we saved 15 cents on the clock/radio that matches the shower curtain.

That's exciting because we can use that fifteen cents to fill up the SUV in the parking lot and go to the restaurant before we hit up the movies. It's a good thing we didn't let those foreigners in to earn some of this money that we just can't afford to pay them. We might have had to give up the five dollar bag of popcorn! The real issue is not that we can't afford to let these people into the system but that the system is so flawed that we're afraid to let anyone in if we don't have to. We don't want to fix the system. It's complicated, cumbersome, and expensive. It would take the government years of fighting to make any progress. Their constituents might lose money in the deal. Someone might not be happy. They might not get re-elected. So no, we're not going to try to fix welfare, medicare, health insurance, education, social security, the tax code, or any of those other things. We just won't let anyone else in to play. It's our ball, and we're going take it and go home.

We will, however, spend lots of time and money fighting over whether global warming is or is not happenning. If we decide that it is happenning then we will change our tactics and fight about whether or not we caused it or if it's a naturally occurring thing. Then we'll fight about whether we should start to do something about it or if we should wait until everyone else agrees to do it too and then jump on board but only do the bare minimum. We're running out of fresh water, clean air, climate stability, and the ability to depend on things being the same next year as they are this year. Have no fear though. We're fighting about it. It could be just a clever trick being pulled by the democrats and, well, millions of other people all over the world. Mother nature might be playing a trick on us. We'll just wait it out. We'll do something if we absolutely have to. Meanwhile, we'll complain about the price of gas going up, how our SUV is so expensive to fill up, how our airline tickets are so rediculously expensive, and how it's a scam that we have to pay so much money for this excess that we call the American Dream. We'll try to ignore the fact that since we're going to pay the higher rates anyway the damage we are doing is only going to get worse. We'll jump on board and try to fix the problem when we have no other choice though.

At least we have Shrek. Where would we be without our wonderful cartoons. The CGI makes them look so real now! By the way, if you didn't catch the big news of the day, Paula Abdul broke her nose this weekend when she fell down while trying to avoid stepping on her Chihuahua. But don't worry! She will still appear on the season finale of American Idol. Yep, our news media really does have it's thumb right on the pulse of what Americans want to know. Or maybe it's on our throats. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.