9/11 dream

September 11, 2006 by faizoro.

I’ll include a dream I had last night- it being September 11th, and the dream leading me down quite a train of though- I don’t mind being quite grim today.

I dreamed las night that I was explaining an insight over dinner at a restaurant where my mom was present along with some other relatives and or friends.

My mom kept interrupting before I could make my point. I ended up sort of battling her for the right to complete my thought explaining that if I could just quickly get the complete thought out we could discuss it. She quickly grew offended but ultimately after much effort I was able to explain it.

The insight was this: (I have had no such “insight” before outside of the dream by the way)

America has not recovered from it’s recession some six years ago (beginning 2000) despite the suggestion of some of our indices.

Specifically minorities especially the blacks have not recovered from it’s sociological effects. The poor and minority demographics have suffered a tremendous blow which will have untold and deep implications upon community and family life.

At that point we did discuss this a little further. My mother agreed with the assessment and I mentioned that five years ago when I suggested America would not recover from the recession I had been exactly half right. Though there has generally been a full GDP and stock market recovery- the fallout has devastated the poor, spread and embittered urban blight, incarceration rates, “career unemployment” (oxymoron- I realise), and drug abuse (perhaps crystal-meth addition escalation should be sited) and many consequential social ailments such as child neglect, community degeneration and dissenfranchisement.

That’s the end of the dream. Truth be told- I don’t know if I’d had the original conversation sited in the dream projecting the economy’s failure to recover. Also I am not sure how well such an insight matches up with actual data. It does however highlight and value the relationship between an economy (measured qualitatively) with it’s subject communities and domestic as well as foreign societies. For instance, aside from the size, activity and worth or power of an economy, what is it’s shape and color; and how does this ’shape’ effect it’s subjects?

By contemporary measurements the slave economies of the pre-civil war Southern States and of some ancient successful Egyptian periods were probably steller. I last year heard it argued that “Hitler did a lot of good for the German economy. He sure did something about the immigrants too!”- I guess that depends on your definition of “good” and how far you think means (extermination, sterilization, relocation, enslavement and exile) may justify an ends (solving immigration problems).

By humanistic standards, such economic engines would fall abysmally short and as far as I am aware, we really don’t have sufficient national or even academic concern with respect to measuring the influence of our economy in far-reaching and humanistic terms. Certainly, we aught to if we on the one hand we believe that virtue is not automatic to capitalism, or if on the other we are able to understand economic linkages between dismal and plummeting national and global humanitarian and environmental conditions on the whole.

It seems present humanitarian norms are determined increasingly by the corporation, and by the multinational-”conglomerate” whose level of organization and political and legal influence reach increasingly into realms approaching national and international immunity.

Such norms seem to define three increasingly distinct classes:

1. The very wealthy and powerful ruling class which obviously includes the wealthy and powerful, but which should include the stock market its’ self and stockholders categorically as “wealthy and powerful ruling” though individual stockholders might include anyone who may not be wealthy or powerful at all individually.

2. The Middle class (think blue and white collar America)

3. The Exploited class - Slums; slavish consumerism as a category to the extent that debt interest payment begins to account for the expenditure of a persons pay check; the second and third world economies providing the brunt of our slave labor, and receiving the primary heritage of our externalized environmental degradation and industrial pollution.

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