Jul 29, 2023
In the 1800’s, 95% of the Australia population worked on farms. Today, 5%. The industrialisation of the nation. Today, farming itself has been industrialized, and we eat more industrial chemicals than we do food. Yet our life expectancy has lengthened, due to the industrialisation of medicine.
My early years were in an area dominated by market gardens – lettuce, tomatoes, other produce, grown in the rich loamy soil.
People mainly migrants Italians and Croatians worked, hard, during work time; played games only evenings and part of weekends. If there was an emergency at any one place, a whistle summoned – not a tweet, and the entire community came running. There was a real community. That’s all over now: that produce comes from elsewhere at lower costs. Corporate conglomerates replaced the independent, small farm owner and the family business. Robots and automation are replacing humans. The farmer, a dying breed.
Now, we live during the technology-isation and internet-isation era. It was supposed to make us ALL rich and raise us ALL to a life of easy work, leisure, milk and honey. But it is doing the opposite. It is sucking wealth out of many hands and putting it into fewer and fewer. Corporate conglomerates are replacing independent, small businesses. Amazon is what Kmart and Target was, but on steroids.
Entire new fiefdoms born, like Google. A new cyber-road to serfdom. In the past 2 decades, the average white collar worker has added 10 to 20 hours to his workweek, not subtracted it –by the constant connectivity they work everywhere, all the time. For blue collars, wages have stagnated and, more importantly, jobs are being erased at a 6-to-1 ratio vs. new jobs created. For most business owners, complexity and work-week hours increased; incomes have not. And the sacrifices paid for all this – in privacy, personal safety and security, homeland security, mental health, etc. – are extreme.
Of course, it’s been and is an amazing wealth generator for some of us, me included. But on par, in balance, the most destructive force ever unleashed on society yet to reveal the full extent of its ruination.
As with all things, you can’t really control “it.” You can only control you.
Evil in any form can’t exist where it is refused welcome. Our life is the mirror reflection of all the decisions we make – sure, some random chance and “circumstances beyond our control” tossed in, but mostly, personal.
A cyclone may come, but you choose where you live, how weak or strong a structure you live in, with or without a basement, attention paid to weather alerts, and you can greatly affect your odds.
I am not a gambler but I can appreciate odds. You should think hard about how to lessen the odds of bad things happening to you and increasing the odds of good things happening, with everything you do.
Remember: a hammer can be a very useful tool or a very dangerous weapon.
It’s NOT up to the hammer.