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Article I:

It is time to declare that we have had enough of keeping up with the Joneses

When is enough, enough? That is a question that seems to be screaming quietly through the collective psyche of Western culture, yet so few people are brave enough to put it to voice. No one wants to rock the boat. Let’s face it, the waters are choppy enough that it seems it is all we can do to keep H.M.S. America afloat. Sometimes it seems that every facet of Western culture is spiraling out of control. Every change leads to another hundred changes and the only way humankind seems to be able to fight the mounting chaos is by throwing more and more at it.

The basic drive of the American dream is to get more. More than you had yesterday. More than you had last year. More than your parents had at your age. More than your neighbor has now. We want more.

Our government is worried that we may be headed toward challenging economic times so they spread out some cash that we’re all supposed to rush out and create the greatest shopping day ever witnessed by the bean counters. We get free government money because we have over extended our own credit based life style to the point of not having any real cash left to spend.

We learn how to spend as a people from watching our government which has taught us such wonderful lessons; the value of a $300 hammer and $500 toilet seat and the spending power of creating a trillion dollar national debt. Just keep on spending, we can print more.

Let’s just go crazy.

In a sense we already are and have been going crazy since sometime after we first struggled our way out of the mystery that is the origin of man. It only is so much more noticeable now because they are so many darned people out there to diagnose the demons that drive us down this fatalistic crash called life in the 21st century. Rates of depression and suicide soar to new charts and the school shooting has become something that we can expect at least once a year . If we don’t stop the madness soon, then people will start calling it going academic instead of going postal.

The mass insanity of the world is building like a pressure cooker packed with W.M.D.’s and no one wants to look the problem in the face. We fight about whether it is guns that kill people or people with guns. We fight about whether the world is trying to kill us because we polluted it or whether it is just trying to kill us for no reason at all. All the while we continue with the same sociopolitical industrial practices that empower the madness in the first place.

When does it stop? When will we say “enough is enough”? When will there be enough cars on the road?

When will enough children have died? When will we ever have enough money? When will the world look it’s own problems in the face and ask “How do we fix this”?

Enough is enough.

- Dan Donan
Griffon News, 19 Feb 2008 p. 2