ABlog

I'm starting to wonder if there is a michigan meltdown taking place in America. My family just came for a visit (daughter's one year birthday--a big deal in Korea) and just about everyone was facing financial difficulties of some kind. The only person who wasn't was a grandmother living on her deceased husband's GM pension, and she also has a pension from being a school teacher. SOmething very telling in that--a belated sense of bouyancey in an economy distending the "lower" economic classes more with every passing year. Yet the news keeps talking about how the nation's economy is getting stronger. Seems like every week I hear about another plant closing in Michigan. It's not an exaggeration to say every 4th or 5th house is for sale in all the communities I have driven through, from Grand Rapids to Lansing--that's how it was this summer, and everyone said it hasn't changed. Is this normal? I don't know what is keeping it all together. The problems in the housing market seem to be just coming to the forefront of things...well, to get to the point: I don't see how anyone can predict society moving forward, business as usual. We seem to already be in an inflationary cycle, with consequences perhaps as serious if not more so than what took place in the great depression. At least in the longterm. I can see why I left America. The way people think, the way the country and the economy works--it's all pretty selfish and shallow. Serious problems with community. I'm starting to wonder too though if it is just America that is most at risk of this meltdown. Europe seems so forward thinking. Prague was so clean, cheap, and structured as a community. All of Europe seemed that way. Korea, for all its faults, in its own way has the same kind of infrastructure capacities in place. It'd be interesting to see what the world and America is like in the future, but I doubt, given the way the world has evolved and continues to change, if it will resemble Cunningham's vision.

-Ian