Down the Rabbit Hole

Remember the movie, The Matrix? Remember how everyone had been tricked into thinking they were living real life when it was really only a computer simulation of a made-up reality? Remember how the only threat to this fantastical, non-existence was the people who were outside the matrix?

It’s starting to appear to me that what we’re witnessing in the meltdown of Wall Street and the collapse of the financial well-being of the U.S. is like a whole bunch of people getting flushed out of the matrix at once, looking around doe-eyed at the destruction around them, wiping the muck off themselves, and wondering, “What the hell was that?!”

Some of them wish they could climb back into the goo and go back to sleep. Others are looking at their barren stock portfolios or bankrupt employers and wishing they’d seen it coming. Still others, who haven’t yet been touched by the success of The One in destroying that which held us prisoners of illusion, wait in fear that they might be next.

The matrix is consumerism… Make that rampant consumerism. Rampant consumerism fueled by a financial system and national mindset that encourages everyone to live in a house they can’t afford, drive a car they can barely pay for each month, eat in restaurants that in the old days were only frequented by wealthy jet-setters, buy big-ticket electronics and appliances… we all know the story.

Part of the philosophy behind the TARP at the end of Bush and the stimulus passed at the start of Obama is to “get the banks to start lending again.” Usually the context of this objective, especially in selling it to Congress and the people, is so that businesses can continue to run, which makes sense. Many businesses need some sort of credit instrument in place to be able to keep things functioning without interruption due to cash flow considerations. I get that.

But behind the veil of helping-out businesses is the real reason we want to get the banks lending again. So that we can go back to our irresponsible consumerism-based economy. That’s right, climb back up the tube, into the tepid, viscous liquid so that we can continue pretending that our economic house of cards is made of brick and mortar, not thin cardboard. We want to be virgins again.

Well, America, you can’t untake the red pill and this genie’s not going back into the bottle. Doing so would be tantamount to sticking our heads back into the sand and believing it’s not all going to come crashing down once more when the current bandaids break free.

We’ve crossed an eye-opening threshold, and I would love to see what the real world of mass financial responsibility looks like. As with anything, the unknown can be dark, scary, and foreboding, but transforming the economic basis of this country from wealth-as-illusion to wealth as a function of real value, created by and for the people, can only be a giant step in the right direction.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 07:42 and is filed under Politics, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.