End of An American Dream
By Richard William Posner
25 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org
I was born in America in nineteen forty-seven.
I was raised in a blue-collar family, neighborhood and town. It was a time when workers were at least given token respect and appreciation by those who lived off their labor. A man with a decent job was able to provide a good home and life for his family. The moneyed capitalist elite had not yet redrawn the class barriers of feudal England, but they were working on it.
Those days are gone.
I grew up in a time of transition. I found myself among the first of the “latch key kids”. It became necessary for my mother to join my father at work. Costs had begun to rise while earnings began to stagnate. I spent my life at labor, working long hours and earning less instead of more with each passing year. I have been a “common labourer” all my life. I'll be proud of that fact to my dying day.
I have seen America transformed from what seemed a shining beacon of hope and freedom to a dark and vicious aggressor nation, ruled by an utterly ruthless capitalist regime seeking absolute global hegemony. Appearances can be deceiving. America was a beautiful, shiny apple that was rotten at the core.
Now I live in amerika. The shine is gone and darkness prevails. At the beginning of a new millennium, we have regressed to a society of medieval mores and a rigid class system. We are entering a new Dark Age, which promises to rival the old in suffering, depravity and oppression.
We have technology at our disposal that could help create a world civilization of peace, equality and prosperity while preserving a beautiful, natural, ecologically sound planet. We choose instead to use that power to rape, pillage and destroy all that we see. We have chosen war rather than peace, fear rather than joy, greed rather than generosity and death over life.
As I enter “the autumn of my madness”, I am overcome with sorrow. Every time I look at my grandson or hear his innocent laughter, tears fill my eyes. My heart is crushed at the thought of the future I am leaving him.
I am witnessing the end of an epoch.
The dream I had, of peace in my lifetime, has been replaced by despair for the future.
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