No Promises

Sometimes I can't for the life of me understand what America some people live in.  Now the country is far from perfect but in general most of us have a reasonably nice life.

Yes, for some it was better when manufacturing was less automated and more domestic and many low paying jobs have been eliminated due to automation, but most of us have jobs, even if they aren't as good as we would like.

Now being unhappy in your job is nothing new but some folks seem to think there was a golden age when everybody was just happy.

That never existed, and the images from TV were made up.  We talk about the greatest generation but those people dealt with the depression and World War 2.  Some remember that war as a time when Americans came together, and maybe it was except they were fighting and dying in Europe and Islands in the Pacific while millions of people died in concentration camps.

Not really a golden age.

The 50s were noted by the fact that America was in a unique place because many of our industrial rivals had been devastated but we had Korea and the constant threat of Nuclear devastation as we watched communism advance in parts of the world.

We also had Jim Crow and the oppression of a part of our population simply because of the color of their skin, a problem not yet gone.

We had dangerous pollutants being used on our food and poisoning our waterways.

Yes for many of us, primarily because we were young, life seemed simple and there was a promise that if we didn't do anything really bad we would get a good paying job and live a middle class life.

Well there never was such a promise, life is complicated and you have to do what needs to be done.

Technology has transformed the world, for the better, and we have lots of rivals in the world market.

If you thought you could spend you life getting paid for something a machine could do just as well, you were mistaken.

Get off your butt and stop blaming others, you are to blame for not developing the right skills.

Those factories and mines are gone and new opportunities will arise, but you have to be able to grab one when it comes, not cry into your beer while watching football on your color flat screen TV.

Maybe you already have the American Dream.