We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, January 27, 2014

Like Your Hair’s On Fire

Click here to access article by James Howard Kunstler from World News Trust. 

The author sees lots of cultural metaphors surprisingly expressed in a TV series--and they ain't pretty. It's about a high school chemistry teacher who is faced with an expensive battle with lung cancer and turns to making methamphetamine to pay his medical bills.
He just has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Which he does, simply by discarding his persona as an earnest schoolteacher and entering the ranks of illicit drugdom. Of course, the series is mostly concerned with the twists, turns, and torments of that transition, and the metaphors in that are also rich as to what America has lately become.