If you follow me on Twitter you know that I am giving up most of my online time for Lent. No, can’t give it all up since my paying gig sometimes requires that I go online but after monitoring my online time for a few weeks, I decided I needed to get a life. So since the timer is running out on my time this morning, bear with me since I want to get this post done before I shut down the computer until evening time.
So yesterday I was reading the NY Times on-line as I do most mornings and stumbled across this piece. It seems in America we have a new underclass forming, those people formerly known as the middle class. Up until the great recession, there were millions of Americans who thought they had a slice of the American pie…a home or at least a nice apartment, car, a little cash to dine out and shop at the Big Box Stores and chain restaurants and occasionally they could take a vacation. Life looked good, so good that many of em didn’t save nearly enough cash and then bam! Shit happened, jobs were lost and now it looks like there are simply not enough jobs for everyone looking for a job. Turns out if you are undereducated, with no special skills and older than a certain age you chances of getting a job higher than greeter at the local Wally World increases drastically.
These same folks are learning that we now live in a country with no safety net aside from food stamps. Yep, you can get some food but um…its sorta hard to cook it if you are living under a bridge but fuck it! Those are just details, hey I got a home, you got one…hey it sucks to be those people. Now obviously that is not how I feel since if you are a regular reader, you probably realize that I feel deeply for those who struggle with basic needs. Part of it is my wiring and the other part comes from growing up working class.
I don’t have any answers other than thinking someone needs to do something to help folks since the truth is most of us are a stone’s throw away from being on the other side.
So after reading yesterday’s story about folks facing long-term unemployment; today’s piece in the NY Times about space exploration made me think maybe my father,a long-term Star Trek fan is not nearly as nutty as I sometimes think he is…
With the US getting ready to shut down our space exploration program, the stage is rapidly opening for folks to start taking their next vacation to space. That’s right, for enough dollars and believe me you will need a lot of em, you too can journey to that final frontier aboard Virgin Galactic. Hell Virgin Galactic has already collected 44 million dollars in deposits from 326 people dying to make this trip. Folks are starving, need is great and some folks have so much money they can pay in advance to take a trip to space…damn, that says a lot about the state of humankind.
I am not one of these conspiracy theory types but I swear for a few minutes my Dad’s theory that now that folks have raped Mother Earth, that the real powers to be are getting ready to get the fuck off planet earth. I admit it sounds nuttier than Aunt Gladys’ holiday fruitcake but let’s be real…the world as we know it is going and getting ready to go through some hard times. Most countries really don’t have any cash, hellooooo Greece. Shit, I just heard a report today on NPR that if America doesn’t start working on our deficit there may be a day when we too are looking a lot Greece. Who will bail us out?
So what if the motherfuckers with the real money and power decide its time to get the fuck out of dodge, um…there won’t be no po folks in space. Instead we will all be left to figure it out. So yeah, its crazy but for a brief moment it made sense and I just wanted to share. Happy Monday!
