Change is happening faster than I can accommodate to it. The easiest place to see it is in the world of cyber whatever. I was well into senility when the internet was created, and I am having enormous difficulty keeping up with routine administrative/technological changes in my various cyber devices. I force myself to keep trying, but I increasingly dislike the effort. My problem is that I remember a simpler time that I much prefer. My younger acquaintances were born into the cyber world and take it for granted. As a result, they adapt to it more readily than do I. I suggest that is one of the principal reasons that they are more and more divorced from what I think of as the real world. To that extent, it is understandable that they and I do not agree on the best way to resolve various problems between people.
NBC News has an interesting article out today that describes the network of criminal gangs that control the American immigration system. The internet is central to that control, as various criminal organizations use it to control sections of the smuggling route into this country. Immigrants are seamlessly handed off from one group to another all along their route, rarely interacting with them physically and paying for their services with their phones. Sometimes governments are involved and sometimes only criminal cartels, but there is a system in place that stretches to every corner of the world and enables any and all dissatisfied individuals to travel to the promised land here in America. I presume that a similar system exists to facilitate illegal entry into Western European countries. Our response is to see the phenomenon as being either advantageous or disadvantageous to our own personal lives and we clothe our assessment with noble thoughts and endless chatter, but we do not do anything to change the basic situation.
Washington’s response is to assign the problem to the Vice President and the Border Police and then try to forget it as being irresolvable. As a result, we are seeing virtually every stress point in American society under increasing strain. Conservatives generally favor blocking access. Liberals generally favor more “humanitarian” solutions that accept huge numbers of new immigrants into this country. Because we do not have enough infrastructure to accommodate our existing population, the influx adds significantly to the disfunction of our urban areas where the immigrants tend to concentrate initially. That, in turn, has led to an exodus out of our cities to our suburbs on the part of the segment of our population that controls society. (Here again, the internet has made that possible as an increasing number of us work from home.).
Unbelievably, the overall response to the challenge presented by all and sundry is to dither mindlessly. Conservatives insist on closing the border. Liberals insist on accepting all who claim, rightly or wrongly, that their life in their home country is intolerable. Nobody suggests that we should make the rest of the world livable so as to stop the mindlessness that is destroying us. I do indeed worry about another 911 implemented by malcontents being inserted into our country by malevolent groups, but I see a much greater danger that is dramatically contributing to the ongoing degradation of our lives. We are bringing far too many strangers into this country far too rapidly for us to absorb them into society. The result is additional disagreement about virtually everything imaginable - from the price of eggs to the proper use of pronouns. Arguing about foreign injustices in foreign lands threatening to further harm this country is but one of the results.
Were I influential enough, I would close the border, remove all illegal entrants, and reinvigorate a program designed to help the rest of the world live a better life in their own part of the world. My success would depend on our ability to achieve real progress in making other countries successful economically and that would risk angering conservative protectionists among us in exactly the same way that we are today worried about the “rise of China.” More and more, I see our greatest problems to be intellectual and physical lethargy, stimulated by wishful thinking and intellectual cowardice. We are used to being on top and dislike the thought that we might have to hustle to stay there. World leadership is our rightful place and insurgents had just better understand that or else. Wherever and whenever all of this becomes too obvious, we retreat into the make-believe world that is on our phones. Tik Tok. Tik Tok.
No comments:
Post a Comment