Can You Spot the Flaw?

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I'm sure we all remember the 50's, even if we weren't alive for them. Every man had a wife and 5 kids, and every man had a job which could pay for his family's food, shelter, clothes, college, and annual vacation, plus a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot. Nowadays, though, Wifey has to work, and the kids do too, just as soon as they're old enough, and even then the family is still scraping by. And let's not forget that the family size has dropped to 1-2 kids now.

What happened?

When did life shift from being so easy that only 1 mouth in 7 had to work to being so hard that even when every mouth works the family still can't get by? If you take a look at some of the other countries out there, they've got larger family sizes and fewer mouths having to work to feed the family. How did things go so horribly wrong in America?

We can spend all day pointing the finger at things and not be wrong. Poor examples being set by our leaders and our heroes. High divorce rate. No dads in the home. Hypocritical religious and political leaders. Schools failing and being set up to fail. Drugs. Gangs. Prostitution being outlawed. Medical malpractice. Frivolous lawsuits. Obscene copyright lengths. Software patents. Gene patents. The RIAA and MPAA. Blamestorming.

The list goes on.

And on.

And on.

We're looking for someone to blame. One person or group to pin all this on. The one source of all the trouble, after which everything else is merely a symptom and will go away if we correct the one flaw and throw the rascals out. But who? Blacks? Whites? Gays? Christians? Jews? Muslims? Unions? The rich? Doctors? Liberals? Conservatives? Gangs? The Illuminati? Scientology? God? Satan? Teachers?

Who's leg do we gotta hump to get our lives back?

And can we ever get it back? How hard will it be to do so?

One of the big obstacles seems to be citizen apathy and hopelessness. Sure, once in a while, millions of people get upset about some useless celebrity getting in trouble or talkng out their butt, or if one person in a billion dies of some obscure thing, there's a massive campaign to make everyone else's life harder, but when it comes to something important which would actually benefit everyone, like important amendments to the Constitution which would make political corruption much more difficult, or asking the super-rich to pay their fair share for all the benefits we provide them, suddenly, even though a near-unanymous majority agrees, nothing gets done and almost no one makes an effort. The movement then either dies or becomes the province only of "crazy" people.

Did people just suddenly become stupid, or was this done to us maliciously by someone who wants to control us so we can't kick them out of power when they abuse it, as we peasants have historically done when our kings step far enough out of line? I'm sure you can guess which of these two possibilities I suspect.

So what are you going to do? Which is more important to you? Making sure those who are out to take everything you have don't get away with it, or watching yet another Kardashian self-destruct?

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