My name is USA and I’m an addict.

The question is everywhere: “How did all of this happen?”  The economy.  The endless war.  The National Debt.  All of it.  Some people ask the question differently: “What were we thinking?”  “Who’s responsible?”

How can we not know?  Seriously, are we all blind?  How could something as big as this be at all a surprise?

I think that we have two problems.  First, we don’t like bad news.  Especially the really big, awful bad news that depresses us when we are confronted with big problems.  War, poverty, disease, famine, economics etc.  The general population has no idea how to manage global or national problems.  Most of us are not skilled in these issues.  So, when confronted by these issues, we “stick our heads in the sand” and try to forget.

There is one particular piece of bad news that this country, The United States has been avoiding: We have become complacent. During the 40′s, 50′s and into the 60′s we were the greatest economy and the most powerful nation on earth. We came out of WW II with an incredible workforce, the baby boom and a consumer economy that was both voracious and productive. Those were the golden years. Our military might was challenged by the Soviets and Chinese dictatorships. Even so, we grew, we had babies, we made things and life was grand.

The honeymoon ended however, when Japan and Germany had finished rebuilding. Their industrial base not only was fully rebuilt from the war with newer equipment and modern technology, but their workers were motivated to take direct aim at bettering the US in quality and quantity. They did things differently. Their children went to schools that cast out religious and political motivations for hard science curriculums. The adult workforce drove itself beyond exhaustion to innovate and produce in ways that far surpassed the US competition. They got smarter, they worked harder and they had the goal in mind of beating the US.

This is where the complacency first set in. We did not take them seriously. All parties earned equal share in the blame. Labor and Management were set upon short term goals achieved as adversaries of each other. Government had already been taken over by a massive Defense Industry. They all wanted the status quo to continue, because they had a pretty good thing going. Maybe the didn’t want to rock the boat for fear of losing the gravy train, or simply thought that we were invincible so long as we built more bombs.

Finally Japan, Germany and others surpassed our manufacturing sector.  We started making less. We had to find a way to grow the economy and someone hit upon the idea of becoming a consumer economy. We chose to replace lost manufacturing revenue with retail revenue earned by participating in our mass consumption economy. If we couldn’t make more, we’d eat more.  A bizarre, twisted plan to pretend that our national debt was our GNP.  It sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged.

With this distraction, the economy keeps going and no one gets upset. It was an illusion. It was a bubble economy, created to keep us from admitting or noticing that we had become complacent and less productive.

Since that time, we have been treated to different bubbles:

• The Space Race
• The Vietnam War
• The Cold War
• The S&L bubble
• The 80′s M&A bubble
• The Tech bubble
• The Energy Trading bubble
• The Mortgage bubble

We were high on bubbles.  These were distractions for middle class.  For the poor, there were drugs, alcohol, bad food and tobacco to keep them distracted and disempowered.

Bubble after bubble, we created an orgy of borrowed cash for us to buy plastic goods, plastic food, stop making anything ourselves, guzzle foreign oil, become timid, syncophantic consumers that spend our time hating each other and living off scraps from the oil / defense masters’ table.

So, we got complacent and then we scared.

The second problem is that we made this happen.  We allowed ourselves to be ‘bought off’ or bribed for our silence or participation in a fire sale of the American Dream.  We’ve been paid off with bubbles.  It did not simply happen to us.  We asked for it – begged for it.  We sucked up to the TV, as Harlan Ellison described perfectly (The Glass Teat) the addiction mindset.  We tuned out.  We embraced ideologies of racism and classism.  We took in the bubbles to forget the worry, the fear and to pretend that we were working harder and smarter.  In fact, we were only pretending.  We weren’t changing with the times, we were resting on our laurels.  We regressed from independence into dependence – willingly.

This economic crisis is very likely the beginning of our long overdue bar tab, being submitted for collection.  It is time to pay the piper.  It is our call to accountability.  In very real terms, we will either pay down our own debts or leave them to our children and their children.  Only time will tell if we can admit our addiction to bubbles and thus begin an honest recovery.  Or, we’ll lie to ourselves again and go on another binge.

We have some major challenges.  We need to create an actual economy that will sustain us for generations to come.  We need to shed ourselves of the shackles imposed by Oil and Defense industries.  However, we cannot free ourselves from those that peddle the bubbles until we take control of our own addiction.

Will we face our world and our actions high or sober?  This much is certain however: our choice will determine our legacy.

- gadfly