Urban Issues and Actions

As Circuit City declares bankruptcy, our Big Three Auto manufactures self-destruct and our economy is in a state of peril unrivaled in our history, I wonder how effective our current economic system is? Throughout the 2008 presidential election the dangerous “S word” was constantly hurled at Barack Obama in an attempt to discredit him, but clearly the “C word” is crippling our society, so how bad can the “S word” actually be? In case you did not get the reference, the “S word” stands for socialism, which no red-blooded American would ever want to be. We would never want a system of equality where everyone has a roof over their head, food in their stomach, clothes on their back and a decent shot at success. Equal education, a stronger welfare system and a redistribution of wealth such that it’s not concentrated within 1% of our population is an outrageous suggestion- Thus; we remain ever faithful to our good old American system of capitalism. However, since capitalism clearly is struggling at the moment, and we would never want to be a socialist society, maybe we can find a happy medium in compassionate capitalism. We can still have our system of stratification, where one can claim the elusive title of the upper-class and others can revel in the normalcy of the middle-class, but also have a system where everyone can make a living wage and get a decent education. We constantly complain about illegal immigrants taking “our jobs” and “our jobs” being shipped overseas, but if it wasn’t for our system of capitalism those jobs never would have been taken away from “us” in the first place. So maybe we need to move away from this unchecked system of capitalism which we have come so heavily to rely on. Substitute cheap megastore prices for the ability of everyone being able to clothe and feed their families. Not tying the idea of middle-class to the fact that some people can’t pay rent. Because, at the end of the day, our current situation is hurting us all. The sad part is that it took us this long to realize that our system wasn’t working. It took gas prices rising, and homes’ foreclosing for people to begin to realize that a change needs to be effected, even though for some people these new found hard-times have been a life long reality. But on a positive note, let’s take the struggle of the times, and try and help everyone struggle less, not just the middle-class, not just Joe the Plummer, not the movers and shakers on wall-street, but EVERYBODY.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.