One Brick Short

As the camera panned the landscape, full of cars and bicycling commuters, heads into the wind and peddling with purpose like Miss Gulch with a dog in the basket, I noticed a squat gray building of only thirty-four stories. I couldn’t see if there were words of the main entrance, words like Beijing Central Hatchery and Conditioning Center. I couldn’t see if there was a motto that went something like Community, Identity, Stability, but there very well could have been.

It’s a brave new world out there. As the headline writer noted over Eugene Robinson’s column in today’s hardcopy of The Daily Progress, “it’s a brand-new, scary world.“

Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood is not so friendly. It has Russia invading Georgia—our personal ally whom we cannot protect because we have opened up a two-front war on terrorism—and China growing and expanding and taking over, well, everything. Hey, they took over our manufacturing and our market a long time ago, and we gladly sent them the jobs. We morphed ourselves from a production based national economy to a consumer-based economy. Except that, when people can’t keep jobs, they can’t consume and if they have no place to build, create or develop to make money, they have no jobs.

That’s the way of it. Russia is looking out for it’s national strength by taking over smaller countries that cannot fight back—as it did while known as the Soviet Union—while China is building its economy through community, identity and stability planned from the central committee of the party. The European Union, comprised of a cast of characters whose fortunes ran out in the last century, is desperately trying to bind together in one last grasp for greatness.

And we are bickering over who was asleep at the wheel when the ship of state went aground.

Since World War II we have focused on the world. We have focused on the profit we could get from the world and from our bosses and from our workers. We have focused on where we came from—Mexico, Ireland, North, South—and what we are (lesbian, straight, evangelical, atheist, Catholic, Muslim) rather than where we’re going and who we are.

We have focused on everything but who we are as a nation.

The Russians don’t share that issue. Certainly, the Chinese know who they are. Both are taking their traditions and shared sense of identity and working it to their advantage.

Perhaps it’s time for us to focus on us. It’s time to drop our class animosity. It’s time to work together, to modify capitalism and socialism to a peculiar and new North American concept. Let’s bring labor and stockholders, managers and financiers together to give everyone a chance to prosper. Perhaps a few tax breaks for companies who move their plants out of Mininesia and Mamosa and Plebeistan and bring them home to pay a decent wage with decent benefits would help.

We need to get working. We need to produce. We need business and labor to work together to create a sustainable middle class. We need to take a page of the Russian playbook and look out for ourselves while integrating the Chinese concepts of redefining our community as our country, our identity as United Statesians and stability as working together to have solid economy, even if it means fewer outrageous profits in the short term for better prosperity in the long term.

The world is changing. We need common sense and each other to survive, let alone thrive.

Aw, who am I kidding? It’s adult swim, man, every one for himself!