National grief may result from political fear and apathy which promotes depression. For a country, this manifests itself as economic depression. The United States is in an economic viability recession that started with the first dot com crash beginning March 11, 2000. In many ways, we are still reeling in pain from that loss as we heal from the grief associated with national financial upheaval. That dismal day … along with others since (9/11, Housing bubble, Lehman collapse) have left America financially tattered. In fact, the Nasdaq composite still rests at about half of the value it posted over a decade ago. Capitalist visionaries like recently deceased Steve Jobs have buoyed the country along to a degree although we continue to float aimlessly around in a pot of economic troubles which churns bad news and harder times for all Americans.
America has the potential to move beyond the depressive state we are faced with as we go through the stages of grief together. The good news is that we may be transcending the depression stage and moving to the acceptance stage. With acceptance, we are now ready to adopt and get behind a single BIG IDEA which will bring us all to a much better place! It is about time; and remember, all boats rise when the tide comes in!
When the Internet bubble burst, everyone smartly jumped onto the housing bandwagon until that bubble burst in 2008. After housing prices collapsed, we have been left with no alternative asset classes to blow up. What do we have left to believe in order to get us out of this financial maelstrom we are in? We need another Internet, an Apple, a Microsoft, a juggernaut Company that represents a paradigm shifting movement. The answer may involve the national adoption of ideas such as Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies (ET3). Many things travel and humans have always felt the need having followed the impulse to create roads, paths, bridges, tunnels, tracks, airways, and channels so that things that need to travel could do so in an efficient manner … without potholes, ditches, or other interruptions. We have created chipsets to allow electrons to travel in circuits so that we may compute and process information the way we do. The skies and lower heavens are completely diagramed into pathways for various forms of air and space traffic so that we may travel around the globe. The human race seems happy to work hard to satisfy and expand beyond the status quo when it comes to transportation technologies.
The backbones of U.S. Interstate Highway System and the Internet are strikingly similar in nature. We have benefited greatly by investing the billions of dollars it has taken to construct our national highways and the trillions to create what is our Internet. Our ability to think BIG and invest fully into these types of ideas is the ONLY thing that can keep a country on the positive upward economic trend. Yes, we may have things of value that we can fall back on and develop further like we did with housing. But the fact remains, we need make a huge step forward in some specific direction whether it be transportation, education, communication, medicine, governance, even war would ultimately have a positive effect in that mobilizing efforts on a national scale and investing collaboratively in a BIG IDEA has its rewards that come in the form of a growing economy. China’s massive Three Gorges Dam project, as well as, several of their maglev train and city building project harness the collective abilities of the peoples and push the country forward together.
America has become accustomed to looking at the bean counters for answers, looking at the Dow Jones Averages for hope, looking at politicians for help. We are doomed if we cannot agree on a loft, meaningful project to embark upon of national proportions so that we may all be engaged, employed, and uplifted as we convert our energy, and available natural resources into projects like ET3, for example. Our president should be actively engaged in mobilizing our national resources and apply them in their might and totality into some meaningful direction. The Federal Reserve has been playing wet nurse to our dilemma in a daily reminder that we are in critical condition and on death’s bed awaiting for the complete annihilation of “our way of life” and capitalism in general if we continue to do nothing. Creating sustainable jobs can only be accomplished by complete belief and support in a BIG IDEA. Otherwise, we will decentralize and move towards a semi third world police state with bastions of prosperity centered around unions, successful companies and/or universities. The “state” which includes in my example all federal, state, and local governmental employees has way too many employees running in circles in a perpetual tax on the overall population. We have to dedicate ourselves to the BIG IDEA and back it up by imagining that we can govern ourselves without such intrusion by all levels of government. At the same time we collectively decide upon something to do, we must choose to keep our political system from strangling our lifeblood. Our political system should have a “backstop” that is absolute authority in nature which allows a President to adopt initiatives that can lead to great things for the people. Interestingly, Libya is a prime example of a country that had decided through it leadership to invest in the Great Manmade River Project. It is the largest underground network of pipes and irrigation systems in the world and supplies fresh water to millions of Libyans. This project, like China’s Three Gorges Dam, are examples of what can be accomplished when a single authority can take action for the greater good of the people. Western media hardly ever will mention any reference to such projects because they were completed without borrowing money from banks like the IMF or World Bank (although China’s project did include financial instruments through investment banks like Morgan Stanley in order to meet its development costs.
American’s are beginning to accept the downward demise across the board and it will result in continued conflict (Class Wars) less we all get on some bandwagon TOGETHER and do our Collective Consciousness some good and adopt the BIG IDEA. P.S. The Internet is a physical communication medium manifested through the will of our collective consciousness … we should start there!