I think that the American Way of Life is leading to a collapse. America runs on capitalism which grows on using the land to make profit and when there is no more land left, capitalism falls. Holidays are created to celebrate the idea of purchasing unnecessary products that just waste energy and materials. Since the worker's labor is the source of all wealth, capitalists would not make any profit if the workers rebelled. Doctor's would also like to make profit so they use drugs and surgical devices to make the birth process easier for them.
Capitalism runs on three frameworks and one of them is the land that capitalists extract raw materials from. After turning the raw materials into products, capitalists then sell the products to make profit which gets turned into wealth. Because of their greed, capitalists continue to gather raw materials without thinking about how much of the materials are left. Then, when the materials run out when Americans need them most, there will not be any left because they have already been used up. Capitalism also allows competition between multiple corporations for cheaper prices in the free market so they can make the most profit. Now there are more than just one company trying to get their hands on raw materials so the rate of the country losing its resources doubled, or maybe even tripled. Capitalism creates an over exploitation of the land for profits and competition that acts as a catalyst to bringing the country close to a collapse.
America creates holidays - like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas - that allow the country to waste resources. During Thanksgiving, some families go out for a big dinner when they can just stay home and cook dinner. In the video we saw in class back in December, they said that Americans consume ten times more than Chinese people and thirty times more than Indians. Black Friday is the day when companies lure Americans into buying their products by making a sale. Americans then fall into their trap and start spending their money without taking the time to think about the amount of resources used to make these products. The same goes for Christmas; Americans get into the habit of buying presents and exchanging them for other gifts. It is basically exchanging money, except it involves purchasing things made out of the world's resources. People do not think about whether it is necessary to buy things that just wastes energy and resources. Actually, some people do think about the world's future and, therefore, created the Buy Nothing Day. However, this Buy Nothing Day was not really effective because people continue to attend the sales and buy unnecessary things. Americans are just used to living their life using up the world's resources.
The poverty line for a family of two is $14,000 and when we calculated the minimal yearly expense, it was $28,000. Many people have to cut down on a lot of expenses like food, in order to stay above the poverty line. Back then, slaves were treated horribly; they did not get paid and they worked in harsh conditions. When they finally got together and fought against the white slave owners, the slaves won and the slave system fell. If the workers feel that they are not getting paid enough, then they can get together and stop working for capitalists. And when that happens, the capitalists would not earn any profit and the capitalist economy would fall.
Doctors also play a role in wasting resources and causing the collapse. They drug the women when they are giving birth and they use interventions when they are not needed. Doctors do not think about the things that go into making the drugs and about the amount of resources they can save by not drugging the women. Hospitals have high technical machines that are used to perform interventions such as C-sections. All those machines use up a lot of energy and the doctors do not take into consideration the energy they can save by allowing the women to have a natural birth. The only things they think about is saving time so they can maximize their profits and by using drugs and machines, they are wasting resources.
Jacara: I don't think that Andy is saying we can't do anything about it. On the contrary, I think that he that he is giving us the information to create a revolution o_o
Sandy: Yes, denying services kills people but people don't actually buy insurance until they find out that they have an ailment. So if everyone starts to do that, the insurance will lose money and then there won't be any insurance. And because of how our economy works, everyone wants to earn profit so insurance denies services.
Jia Min: You have a good point when you connected the Easter Islander's values of creating statues to American's value of advancing technology; the islander's are wasting resources by creating statues and American's are wasting resources by creating more complexx technologies that use up a lot more resources.
2 comments:
Maggie-
Hey, first off, nice overview of all the units we've covered. I agree with you on most of these concepts.
There are, however, two things I would like to ask you to reconsider:
1.)At one point in your essay you spoke of shitty working conditions under which many lower class Americans operate. You claim that it is as simple as using your services as collateral, now tell me this; lets say you are a small business owner and you buy some of your products from this big corporation for way more than is reasonable. If you were to impose an embargo against them they could just fall back on their other clients. They could easily just cut you off, cold turkey, and their sales would still be more or less the same. My point being that the workers are interchangeable; were they to stop working for the "capitalists," who, by definition, already have money, the boss men would just get some mexicans to do it. Their individual input isn't that important because the capitalist pigs could just as easily employ some other poor person who'd be just as happy to make that money.
2.) In regards to doctors; lately I have been talking to my individual team of doctors, and not one of them seemed nearly as profit-bent, or plotting as we have made them out to be in this class. Next time you go to your doctor, talk to them about this stuff. They don't become doctors to fuck people over and make shitloads of money. They could just as easily become a buisness bastard on wallstreet. People who want to become doctors pay more for their education than they even make in the combined first years of actual hospital work. And malpractice insurance is a bitch.
Think about these things. But overall I think you have done a wonderful job laying down the basic injustices in the American Way of Life.
I like the way you layed out all your thoughts in the first paragraph. I was able to glean, from the start, your opinion and how each point related to another. I agree with you that all of those factors are leading to the collapse of the American way of life. Would you say that these same factors are effecting other countries, and that there are other parts of the world just as susceptible to a crash? If you could rank other parts of the world in terms of how likely their society is to collapse -- how would you do it? How would your own culture stack up against the American way of life? As someone who has a Chinese background, would you say China lives in a more/less sustainable way than America? Why/why not? How might this impact your desire to change things/move/start a revolution?
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