In 1962, as a teenager, I visited Detroit for the first time.
It was exciting to see the city that, more than any other, symbolized the great American industrial achievement that my high school civics text credited to capitalism’s shining superiority over Cold War communism.
Everything was quite impressive at the start.
But then my cousin drove me over the Ambassador Bridge for a quick visit to Windsor, Ontario. As we crossed back into Michigan, I was shocked to see that the initial image Detroit presented to any arriving traveler was a terrible, expansive slum.
Except for horrifying photographs of Vietnamese children that had been burned by our side’s napalm, which would sicken and radicalize me a few years later, nothing I’ve encountered in life so strikingly altered my perception about my country as that glaring reality.
Now Detroit is officially bankrupt, and payment for rectifying this monumental “free enterprise” breakdown will be extracted from the good workers who gave their all, over decades, to generate enormous wealth and value that, when appropriated by self-serving bosses and shareholders, set Detroit on its destructive slide.
As that bankruptcy made news, we also learned that U.S. education humiliatingly trails global leaders by dozens of ranking points.
Pope Francis is correct. Societies that worship private profit, at the expense of ordinary people’s essential well being and advancement, aren’t just wrongly-founded. They’re evil, and destined for wholesale disintegration.
Meanwhile, political forces—particularly those on the extreme right—are entrenched in defiant defense of that which is clearly untenable.
They laud ”liberty,” but what they actually mean is the illegitimate license to freely run veritable suction hoses from workers’ slimming billfolds into fat cats’ brimming coffers.
They cry ”socialism,” in an immoral effort to discredit any fair and just policy that would serve everyday folks, not lavish marauding monopolists and financial bandits.
As these and other individual streams of societal failure merge into one inescapable reality clearly signaling systemic collapse, two questions forcefully come to mind:
Wasn’t it like this during the last days of Rome?
Is there any way, apart from a populist/progressive mass uprising, for America to avoid Rome’s eventual fate?
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
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Wasn’t it like this during the last days of Rome?
Posted on December 17, 2013 by Dennis Rahkonen
In 1962, as a teenager, I visited Detroit for the first time.
It was exciting to see the city that, more than any other, symbolized the great American industrial achievement that my high school civics text credited to capitalism’s shining superiority over Cold War communism.
Everything was quite impressive at the start.
But then my cousin drove me over the Ambassador Bridge for a quick visit to Windsor, Ontario. As we crossed back into Michigan, I was shocked to see that the initial image Detroit presented to any arriving traveler was a terrible, expansive slum.
Except for horrifying photographs of Vietnamese children that had been burned by our side’s napalm, which would sicken and radicalize me a few years later, nothing I’ve encountered in life so strikingly altered my perception about my country as that glaring reality.
Now Detroit is officially bankrupt, and payment for rectifying this monumental “free enterprise” breakdown will be extracted from the good workers who gave their all, over decades, to generate enormous wealth and value that, when appropriated by self-serving bosses and shareholders, set Detroit on its destructive slide.
As that bankruptcy made news, we also learned that U.S. education humiliatingly trails global leaders by dozens of ranking points.
Pope Francis is correct. Societies that worship private profit, at the expense of ordinary people’s essential well being and advancement, aren’t just wrongly-founded. They’re evil, and destined for wholesale disintegration.
Meanwhile, political forces—particularly those on the extreme right—are entrenched in defiant defense of that which is clearly untenable.
They laud ”liberty,” but what they actually mean is the illegitimate license to freely run veritable suction hoses from workers’ slimming billfolds into fat cats’ brimming coffers.
They cry ”socialism,” in an immoral effort to discredit any fair and just policy that would serve everyday folks, not lavish marauding monopolists and financial bandits.
As these and other individual streams of societal failure merge into one inescapable reality clearly signaling systemic collapse, two questions forcefully come to mind:
Wasn’t it like this during the last days of Rome?
Is there any way, apart from a populist/progressive mass uprising, for America to avoid Rome’s eventual fate?
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.