Awaken, Occupy the Rural, Suburban and Urban Decline:

In perhaps a cynical delight harbored within ideals to rupture an awakening, the decline of the American system has been evident for those critically aware since the beginning of the Neoliberal experiment. The visual evidence of the decline reflects the limitations of the capitalist ideology.

Firstly, the American Rural dependency and bullying from the corporations particularly Wal-Mart and Monsanto has limited the one-time American ideal of independent farmers and business owners. Throughout the rural wasteland, coining the voice of T.S. Eliot, where the decline from one phase of societal evolution passed to another, and hyped progress hailed industrial technology, yet trapped dependency on big business farms left seed owners to be dominated through property-rights from usurpers of pesticide, fertilizer, and grain. Yet on the other rural path, where small towns throughout the countryside once had independent grocers, butchers, tailors, bakers, and more, now they have been put out of business. Wal-Mart has made ghost towns out of self-reliance.

Secondly, the American Suburban decline reflects decadence too often. Apathy and indifference to the reason for much of the luxury; a throw-away society of consumer goods most often from resources taken from overseas, put together from overseas, and when discarded without clear where, gets dumped in fields, landfills, and wastelands. Commercial realism consumed with materialism that unfortunately is dependent on the goods from elsewhere. For when imports or exports cease due to the economy, most cannot fend for themselves on sustainable gardens, clothing that isn’t sold in the shopping mall, or gathering the raw material to rebuild their wants that have been trucked in from rural and other natural areas: Home Depot, Staples, Lowes, Gap, Banana Republic, and more. Always taking, and yet forgetting to give back to the ecological cycle, there is little to assure clarity before it is too late.

Finally, the Urban areas, even more dependent on food from outside the city limits, has left the poor little choice but to assume inflation is a pay or starve choice. Made passive or divided against one another poor verses poor, hard working cop versus hard worker or unemployed while the elite remain apart. The middle class has always been a fortunate wall between the haves and the have-nots. Convinced that joining the armed service would be their only escape route, they are left to fight wars for someone else’s benefit. Ill health insurance or ill health seems reason enough to feed depression with alcohol and other vices to strategic marginalized streets. But the city is more akin to Baudelaire than T.S. Eliot. Child of giant cities, we as citizens are convinced that it is better to be infantile adults consumers for life than to be critical thinking developers of a better structure.

The Urban, Rural and Suburban wastelands may not awaken without significant leaders who are beyond politics. Organizing is prime. Organizing like Cesar Chavez in the fields or Grace Lee Boggs in the city. Spontaneity is of the essence. How can we see if we do not open our eyes? How can we think if we do not use our brains?