Samad Ramoly

The Scar-Spangled Banner

— Samad Ramoly 

We’re not smart as a nation. We don’t learn from the past, and we don’t plan for the future.
This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing.

What’s needed are big new innovative efforts to fashion an economy that creates jobs for all who want and need to work. Just getting us back in fits and starts over the next few years to where we were when downturn began should not be acceptable to anyone. We should be moving now to invest aggressively in a new, greener economy, with the development of alternative fuels, advanced transportation networks and the effort to restrain the poisoning of the planet. We should be developing an industrial policy that emphasizes the need to regain the manufacturing mojo, as tough as that might seem, and we need to rebuild our infrastructure.
The fault lies everywhere. The Government, the Opposition, the news media and the public are all to blame. Shared sacrifice is not part of anyone’s agenda. Politicians can’t seem to tell the difference between wasteful spending and investments in a more sustainable future. There is a constant din of empty yapping about everything. Voters are primed at the beginning of every new mandate for fundamental changes that would have altered the trajectory of life for the better. Politicians of all stripes, many of them catering to the nation’s moneyed interests, fouled that up to a fare-thee-well.
I swear few Dodolanders would not relate to this “uneasy feeling” expressed (in an edited version above) by New York Times’ alert columnist, Bob Herbert. If the United States is feeling the pinch of global capitalism, I wonder for how long we can afford watching reality through tainted lenses.