The Roots of Social and Personal Depression

I haven’t written in a few weeks for several reasons. One, of course, is that personal commitments all clamored for attention at once and took several weeks of undivided attention to meet. Another is that, frankly, I watch the government response to the economic disaster unfold and I become severely depressed. I watch the same old solutions that have managed to drive us to the present point of distress tarted up in fancy rhetoric and presented as necessary solutions to the endemic social conflicts that are the real causes of our present difficulties.

Somehow, economic issues have become separated from civic issues in the social consciousness. Perhaps the so-called collapse of Marxist Socialism with the fall of the Berlin wall in ’89 functioned as defacto proof of the necessary division between the acts of government and the pursuit of personal wealth. The fact that the old CCP in Russia and the PRC in China are far from Marxist in their politics and policies means little in the common perception. What is also forgotten or misunderstood is how the generation who fought the Second World War pursued economic policies that were consciously rooted in their sense of civic duty. Make no mistake, their social/civic record was not spotless or idyllic. Their racism was an undercurrent that tainted all their decisions until the late 1950s. But even in regards to their racist failings, members of that generation took action that was rooted in civil rights and which brought an economic benefit to all citizens of the US. LBJ, for all his faults, did wonders in bringing that hidden undercurrent to the surface of the social and governmental mainstream by establishing legal tools for its civic redirection and civic redress. His War on Poverty was a magnificent effort that assisted millions of Americans move from abject poverty and hopelessness into the mainstream of American civil and economic life. The effort was gutted and destroyed by those who believe the same “free market” nonsense that infects the politicians of the present generation.

We have ideologically/intellectually separated business decisions from civic consequences. The dramatic rise in unemployment is simply a figure not a story of despair and hardship for those who suddenly find themselves unemployed and unable to financially meet their family's physical needs. The worldwide rise in food prices is an economic phenomenon of an impersonal, mechanical market not the story of millions who exist on the brink of starvation because their income cannot cover the increase in staple food prices. The destruction of the industrial manufacturing base in the pursuit of a high profit “service” economy is not seen as an assault on the livelihood of the minimally educated or traditional craftsman. The consequences of such decisions are framed as impersonal forces at work in a “bottom-line” economy. The social and civic consequences of such “business” decisions are ignored.

Our congress votes billions to bailout greedy billionaires in order to save “jobs” and perpetuate an economic world-view that is destructive of human dignity. Truly depressing.