Whata We Want, Anyway?

I've been reading a couple of essays discussing the 50's in America. It was a decade that many regard with great nostalgia, even those of us who never experienced the decade. Elvis, fins and chrome, Donna Reed and Father Knows Best. It was what some people consider a time when life in America was great. Golden years when we knew who we were, what we were about, and got what we wanted.  Certainly it was a sentinel period as the US transitioned from a "primitive" labor driven society, simultaneously strengthened and compromised by the sacrifices imposed by a world war. We were becoming the society that could relax in the knowledge that we had just completed a successful international ass whoopin', one for which a large part of the globe held us in high regard. We had generated and saved billions of dollars, deferred our material gratification, and it was the decade when payment could finally came due, rewarding our collective sacrifice.  And it was all great, and it all worked, and we were all happy until events of the 60's proved we were no safer, had no more substance in our lives, and didn't really feel as great as we had imagined.  To make matters worse, by the time we closed out the decade of the sixties, every source of inspiration, every great voice calling us to move forward as a nation, to achieve greater and better things, every voice that asked us to believe and build on America's coming of age had been murdered.

Now we live in a time when the United States doesn't make much of anything any more. Well over half of our domestic product is generated within the financial industry, making something out of nothing-- and often to the detriment of the American worker. A large population of Americans are without work, others, millions of them children, live in poverty. Even more seem demoralized and completely disinterested in any productive life. Healthcare and educational opportunity are unavailable to many. The middle-class we were so happy to welcome and idolize in the '50's is shrinking away, the gap between haves and have-nots widening like a scene from the turn of the century-- think 1901.

In spite of all of that, a highly visible America remains committed to a '50's lifestyle as the pursuit of stuff carries forward. Cars and electronics and designer labels. As a nation, we remain as committed to consumerism as at any time in the '50's. Our media remains a healthy industry penetrating every aspect of our lives, expertly massaging our desire for more. If we can just get the next cool thing, check off the next item on the "I Want" list, we can continue to move forward, with strength, with purpose, with resolve... into our pathetic state of civic oblivion. Anyone for a big bold red and a cigar with that?

Thinking about this "evolution" of American society, what drove us in the fifties, what drives us today; where it was we thought we were going and where it is we think we are headed today, I am at a loss to answer that one question:  Where are we headed? Do we know? Of even more concern: Do we care?