I Am and You Are

Madame,

Spending being good for the economy speechmaking has been around since at least Keynesian economic days of the Great Depression, but its tone was generally muted and occasional, although the rise of the expanded consumer economy in the 1950s began to change that.   In the late 1970s and early 1980s, spurred on by the ravages of inflation, but also by the surging strength of the plutocrats, such talk became more open, direct, and frequent.

You are right that beginning in the 1980s (although the 1970s had given it a boost), fewer families lived within their means.  While much of this had to do with the absurd phenomenon of  “Affluenza” (to use the name of a good book), where people spent to meet some ridiculous hyped-up “standard” set up by Madison Avenue and others, an increasing majority, unfortunately, came about because wages simply weren’t keeping up—and at the same time that even more burdens were being thrown on the individual/individual family.

Your points about interns are so appropriate.  The exploitative mentality has now infected most of the big companies, and even many big institutions.  The exploiters keep harping to the field, to the workers, to sacrifice and quit thinking about fairness and money, and instead serve the company/country and sacrifice “or everything will fail.”  The cruel irony that the best compensated, best treated, most privileged at the top are exhorting the least compensated, worst treated, and least privileged to do more calls to mind that very S word you mention.  Thus living out the worst aspect of robber-baron capitalism: How to get the most work out of the workers while paying them the least.

But despair is enervating.  Readers are suggested instead to watch a documentary called, “I Am.”  Everyday acts—even small acts—can change things over time.  Building up, over time, a consciousness that brings change.  Realizing that accumulation beyond your needs is probably a form of mental illness.  That nothing in nature really takes more than it reasonably needs.   That only aberrations do that.  Cancers do that.

G.K. Chesterton  is credited, when asked  by the most famous paper in Britain what was wrong with the world, as simply replying, “I am.”

The documentary maker—a rich and once high flying Hollywood filmmaker—says to us that can also be our answer when asked what is right with the world.

Readers can find out more at: http://www.iamthedoc.com/