Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
Radical transition is
difficult. (An illustrative case study is "Pagan and Christian in
an Age of Anxiety" - http://books.google.com/books/about/Pagan_and_Christian_in_an_Age_of_Anxiety.html?id=VBI6JppgQBAC)
Christians seldom focus the
inconvenient truth that "the purest flowering of Christianity" was
followed by 700 years of Dark Age. (I have never understood the
"Christian" belief that terrestrial conflagration will "work
out" any better than The
Flood, another apocalyptic
event "designed" to cleanse the earth of evildoers. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2011/11/daily-dose-111111-prohibition-and-curse.html)
Lest we forget, The
Dark Ages began just 150
years after Christianity became the official religion of The Roman Empire - a
shorter lapse than separates us from The
Civil War.
As mentioned before,
"optimum child-rearing" would alternate between mothers and fathers
as primary, stay-at-home caregivers. Well-rounded children benefit from heavy
"doses" of both parents. Alternatively, when mothers dominate child-rearing,
an essential imbalance manifests. This imbalance is particularly notable in the
problematic relationships between many mothers and daughters.
Note that Islamic women are
singularly eager to stay at home to dote upon their children. Even so, I doubt
Laura approves the outcome. (Yes... Patriarchy sucks.)
On the other hand, it is
not only difficult, but impossible, to envision stay-at-home Islamic Dads
without consequent need for Islam to radically transform its understanding of
sex-and-gender.
I have not read the following
book, but its existence points to a pending sea change: "The
Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared
Parenting Are Transforming the American Family." http://www.amazon.com/The-Daddy-Shift-Stay-at-Home-Breadwinning/dp/0807021202 ///
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Daddy_Shift.html?id=vI8_ntqFZkoC
***
Beyond sex and gender
issues, I see Capitalist
Consumerism as the linchpin
culprit in "the downside" of America's social transformation. (Follow
the money, Fred!)
Gringos have been
narcotized by the metastasis of stupid -- and stupefying -- stuff, a foul dung-heap blown
out the ass of American Capitalism.
Conditioned to be Pavlovian
"consumer units," Americans now spend their substance on nonsense, on
crap, on ridiculous baubles, on great heaps of unnecessary "stuff"
whose chief "purpose" is to clutter our lives and hobble us like
slave shackles.
Wikipedia:
"The self storage industry is primarily a United
States-based industry: of the 58,000
storage facilities worldwide in 2009, 46,000 were located in the United
States."
What America needs more
than grandiloquent recitation of dogma is an ascetic discipline of consumer
"fasting" coupled with the creativity that can only be born of
frugality and thrift that enables us to thrive.
By learning not to drool
after Big Brother's most recently extruded baubles, we can (and should) live on
half the nation's median income.
$24,400.00 is the federally
designated "poverty level" for a family of four, and all of us
might wisely live within this limit.
Cradle Catholic, George
Carlin, nailed it: "Americans are f_____. They've been bought off. And they
come real cheap: a few million dirt bikes, camcorders, microwaves, cordless
phones, digital watches, answering machines, jet skis and sneakers with lights
in 'em. You say you want a few items back from the Bill of Rights? Just promise
the doofuses new gizmos."
Yes, women's entrance into
the workplace exerted downward "wage pressure," apparently making it
necessary for both parents to hold jobs. But this two-wage-earner
assumption is a red herring based on The
Theology of Consumerism.
America's chief stumbling
block is the erroneous belief that we "need" "all this
stuff," "all this crap," all this "sucking up" to Big
Brother's "patriotic" representation of Uncle Sam.
In a word, we have been
swept away by the deification of reification.
Hey! Want people to poke
their own eyes out? "Just promise the doofuses new gizmos."
Not one gringo in a hundred can conceive the
liberation wrought by frugality and thrift.
We must be smart enough to
"live on little" - a way of life that slips the bonds of
couch-potato-hood whose constituent legions lounge in great pools of flaccid
flesh, physical exercise limited to whichever thumb controls the remote.
In
this photograph, what is more likely?
Are
we looking at two liberal women?
Or,
are we looking at "conservative" victims of Cowboy Capitalism?
Although there is plenty of
blame to go around, it is chiefly America's conservative Captains of
Industry who would have us
believe that gluttony, greed, envy and military-industrial wrath are bedrock
American virtues rather than the deadly sins traditionally decried by
Christendom.
Cowboy Capitalism idolizes The
Seven Deadly Sins and achieves their corrosive goal more efficiently
than Satan himself, bringing in tow the full spectrum of vice and consequent
viciousness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_sins
Sure, there are millions of
people who cannot "make ends meet" - whether from lack of income, or
lack of imagination.
But "the poor are
always with us" and as John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis all
teach, the poor should "be taken care of."
In the main, Americans are
staggeringly wasteful people whose squanderous obsession with kneejerk
consumption and Pavlovian drool comprise the high water mark of Capitalism's creation.
Pax on both houses,
Alan
Alan: I am in favor of capitalism that acknowledges -- as Abraham Lincoln did -- the primacy of labor over capital.
***
Pope Francis Condemns 'Slave Labor' In Bangladesh: 'Goes Against God' http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/05/pope-francis-condemns-slave-labor-in.html
More On Pope Francis And Slave Labor
***
***
The first step in the transformation of "want" into "need."
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