This Wheel's On Fire

The fundamental gift of Western Civilization (to accompany its many curses) is that it offers the promise of getting off the hamster wheel. Western culture broadly embraced the idea that time and existence is neither cyclical nor pre-ordained; life is not a predetermined and endless hamster wheel, but rather a blank terrain upon which we can plot our own course.

That is a profoundly important gift to humanity. Like so many accomplishments, whether attained by individuals or by entire cultures, it has often ceased to be an inspired gift and instead mutated into an excuse for complacency and arrogance. Nowhere is this more clear than that most western of western civilizations, our United States.

We in the United States habitually congratulate ourselves on our greatness, while often ignoring that it's actually been quite some time since we achieved something great. We congratulate ourselves on the election of 1800 rather than castigating ourselves for the election of 2000.

We are raised from birth to see ourselves as trailblazers, and conscious and consciencious shapers of a better future, but quite often we are blazing nothing at all beyond treadmarks on a hamster wheel. Nowhere is this more clear than in the fields of education and energy.

Education and energy are two idols of American politics. All politicians, regardless of ideological huge, bow at the altar of these twin totems. They endlessly intone upon the importance of each, all the while consigning national policy on both to a hamster wheel.

First, for education. Education is funded locally. This is the first clue that national politicians are being disingenuous when they speak of its importance or when they insist that all children have "equal opportunity" in education.

Here's how education policy consigns us to the hamster wheel rather than the ladder or the open road or however else you would have it: education is funded by local cities and towns.

So, if you live in a poor city or town, the funding for your schools will be very poor.

Accordingly, you will receive a poor education. Then, you will have poor job opportunities, meaning you will get a poor job. With a poor job, you will never have any hope of moving out of your poor neighborhood. And when your poor children are born, they will attend the same poor schools that your poor ass did.

That is a hamster wheel. Millions of children are consigned to poor schools, poor choices, and poor futures simply because they were born in.....a poor neighborhood. Now, you might think that poor neighborhoods would get MORE money for schools. And you'd be wrong.

Conversely, of course, if you are born in a rich neighborhood, you will go to rich schools, giving you rich opportunities to gain a rich job and enable you to remain rich so that your children will go to rich schools.

So even in the country that claims to be classless and based entirely on law and merit, who your parents are is still the single best indicator of where your life will take you.

Now, for energy: we all know that the U.S. uses more oil that any other nation and that an-ever increasing proportion of that oil comes from foreign, often hostile, forces.

And what do we do with our oil? How do we use it? To get more oil. We need to get oil because without oil, how could we get more oil? Hamster wheel much?

The biggest consumer of oil on earth is the U.S. military. What does the military use all that oil for? Well, protecting oil.

In 2002, we bought oil from Iraq to fuel our tanks and planes to invade Iraq so that the oil in Iraq would be secure. Because we needed it for our tanks and planes. Which were now occupying Iraq. Circle of life.

The biggest air force in the world in the U.S. Air Force. The second biggest air force in the world is the U.S. Navy. They both consume reservoirs of oil so that they can protect the dwindling reservoirs of oil remaining.

That is not a policy, it is not a plan, and it is certainly not a path. It is a hamster wheel, and a greasy one at that. If only we had an education system that could teach our children to think through such fundamental contradictions....