PIIGS

A cunning array of protests going on both ten miles away in Davis, CA, and ten thousand miles away in Cairo, Egypt. People, seemingly, are pissed off at something.

I am one who is perpetually pissed off. But I lack the advantage of youth to drive me to join protests. If I were 20 years younger I might be responding to things differently than I do today. I ruminate on our energy intensive living arrangements, our cultural shallowness, and people who don't signal when changing lanes -- hardly things we'd gang together and decry in a public square.

Yet, for all my yammering and contempt for the American lifestyle, and for all my longing for a more European living arrangement such as walkable human-scaled communities, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (the PIIGS) are completely fucking broke. I am left wondering if bankruptcy is inevitable everywhere.

A hundred thousand are assembling in Cairo as I write this, facing down the unknowns of a fledgling, dictator-less government. A hundred thousand are assembling in Athens, too, facing down the unknowns of a lifetime of austerity brought about by financial industry malfeasance. A few hundred are assembling tents tonight in Davis, facing down 21% pepper spray more suitable as a bear repellent than human repellent, and facing 100% tuition increases just since 2007.

I happen to have little debt and depression-proof employment. I have little to protest about, and as such I'm able to comfortably blog about trivial matters such as the lack of a bicycle lane on 65th street. I'm not $92,000 in the hole with college loans. I don't owe more than my housal unit is worth. I'm not unemployed. I lack the perspective of many who are protesting, but they are all doing so because they, like I, believe that things ought to be better. But to what extent is all this our own doing? We've:

Complicity allowed corruption and avarice to take root in our political system.
Never once considered our own culpability in creating the hallucinated wealth bubble of 2000-2006.
Allowed government and public institutions to create unsustainable pension guarantees.
Grew our households over the last thirty years not through the accumulation of capital but the accumulation of debt.
Complicity engaged in discretionary wars to cloak our growing dependency on non-renewable energy.
Grew our debt in periods of growth and in periods of recession we grew our debt.
Allowed 135 separate federal programs for the needy to perpetuate dependency on them.
Cheerfully fuckered away our manufacturing base to save $0.35 on a box of Chinese matchsticks.
Allowed 20% of our GDP to be driven by financialization, where every florist became a real estate specialist and every housal unit owner a flipper.
Allowed ourselves to be classified as consumers, not as citizens.

Yet, for all this, Italians too are entering an unprecedented era of austerity while having not engaged in a fifth of the reckless behaviors we have. Perhaps parallels do exist, and likely they too have promised themselves lifestyles they could not maintain.