The Blackening

There is a tremendous volume of chatter about how our recession's over. My favorite analogy is that green shoots of new growth are emerging from the blackened financial landscape. The firestorm has come and gone, the smoldering ashed-over coals have cooled, and wouldn't you know it, life has returned. We can return back to normal.

I keep thinking of back to normal. First of all, this Great Recession, if it ever really was one, if it's over, if it really even begun, didn't even last eighteen months. From a perspective of time, that falls in line with any other ho-hum recession. Even if the globe stopped spinning for eighteen months we'd be fine immediately following such a short reprieve from "growth."

For someone who cheered on our recession, for someone hoping for a catalyst for true change, for someone who wrote monologues on how to survive a depression...I got robbed. But that's sorta what I've come to expect. A blip in expensive gasoline didn't do shit for any of us to even consider, to even question, our lifestyles. We got back to normal prices. Now we'll just get back to normal growth again.

I list what normal means. Read it, then truthfully tell me that you think these are the actions of a sane society:

• 16.5 million annual vehicle sales in the U.S., 96% financed on expensive credit, on top of two hundred million other vehicles we already have.
• Each one driven home, each awaiting service as personal chariots for cheap imported shit.
• Cheap Target and WalMart shit, displacing good paying manufacturing jobs.
• Jobs that used to count, that used to feed families and importantly, provided a dignified living.
• A dignified living that's been displaced by perpetual motoring and perpetual fast food consumption.
• Fast food consumption that leads to poor employment, poor waistlines, and poor health.
• Healthy living practices displaced by mandatory motoring, a complete divorce from our environments.
• Our environment that clearly shows signs of manmade stresses, such as no more salmon in the Sacramento river, no more bluefin tuna in the Sea of Japan, hundreds of square miles of pine beetle infestations, terrible air quality in hundreds of cities.
• Cities who's growth model is solely single use low density sprawl, each one destroying the connection between the city and the country, to which now there is no distinction between either. You drive to the country to escape the city and all you get is more city.
• A countryside mauled by hilltop properties each on their own 7/8th acre, land now unfit for anything...anything!
• Land paved over by endless successions of strip malls, fast food shops, tire and wheel emporiums, and cell phone stores.
• Stores that are decidedly non-local, who's "owners" whose only motivations are decidedly not those that create civilized communities.
• Communities who's health is only gauged by commute times, auto daily traffic volumes, and housal starts.
• Housal starts that have no character, lack distinction, lack coherence, all of which don't relate whatsoever to each other, to human scaled activities, to the environment. Any individual housal unit here could be substituted by any other housal unit there and no one would know the difference.
• Houses that weigh mightily on the backs of 'consumers' who commute to jobs they despise while producing nothing, all to service crushing debt loads in a pointless attempt to keep up with insurance, taxes, interest, and other debt servicing.

This is your normal. Intermission is over, please return to your seat. Growth will return momentarily.