America, the beautiful role model (Update X2)

In my opinion, one way to successfully live in America as an ordinary citizen is to manipulate your mind. My mind takes me to the manipulative level of thinking of America as a role model.

1. A small object, usually built to scale, that represents in detail another, often larger object.
2. a. A preliminary work or construction that serves as a plan from which a final product is to be made: a clay model ready for casting.b. Such a work or construction used in testing or perfecting a final product: a test model of a solar-powered vehicle.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/model

Further, and with no scholarly information or readings of my own to back me up, it is my opinion and for whatever reasons, America gave up on its growth as a country after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. I think that was the straw breaking the camels’ back.

It is as if the evils of the world pledged to abandon America, shifting attentions by going for the ultimate prize of world domination. That evil has sustained its efforts ever since.

The evils have gathered other like minded evils to consummate the pact and I feel to date it is progressing as a contagious virus.

I am mindful that women aside, Jews also greatly benefited from the 1964 Civil Rights act. Living in Washington, D.C., I remember a lot of them immediately moving from above their grocery stores into lily-white upper Connecticut Avenue areas and word about town was they vigorously kept Blacks from moving there. Affluent Blacks moved to what is now called the Gold Coast.

However, and once again with no scholarly information or readings of my own to back me up, it is my opinion that some existing and newer countries developing since the 60s’ have carefully analyzed America in many ways in light of dos' and don'ts. There was a time America was able to “strut her stuff” to be “the cats’ meow” or “the bees’ knees” but that time has, lamentably…… long past…, deeply buried in the grave of its own digging.

So here I am, with nowhere to go with my optimism, stuck with thoughts that a better world is yet to come using the tragedies of America as a model of things to not do as a country. Sad.
Fighting for the dignity of my Ancestors,
God bless Bill Gates, WPFW, C-SPAN and the spirits of the unborn for the help,
BB

Restoring a Hallowed Vision
By BOB HERBERT
Excerpt:
It’s no accident that the great progressive successes of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, a variety of other social justice movements, and the emergence of a vast and thriving middle class all converged in the early post-World War II decades.

And
But the counterattack from the right, with its assaults on labor, its outlandishly regressive tax policies, its slavish devotion to corporate power and its divide-and-conquer strategies on racial and ethnic issues all combined to halt the remarkable advances of ordinary working people.
Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/opinion/10herbert.html?hp
Article via diarist DemFromCT
http://demfromct.dailykos.com/

(Update) We Are Screwed
by Jill Richardson
Excerpt:
Meanwhile, there are millions of ideas out there on how to solve our problems. About a year ago, I interviewed a guy who invented a plug-in electric hybrid designed so that you only fill it up 4 times a year IN THE MID-90s!!!! And what happened? All the auto-makers and the U.S. Department of Energy saw the car... and they did nothing. A few years later, one of the major automakers asked this guy to make them a prototype of a similar car, which he did. He delivered it to them, they did nothing with it. A full decade ago.

And
There's a similar story for agriculture. You can grow corn and soy organically, using your same equipment, getting the same or better yield than you do now, AND sell it for organic prices, using up to 2/3 less oil, AND while sequestering carbon into the soil, and yet few farmers do it. There's no incentive for them to do it. In fact, there are a number of disincentives, since your first few years in transition you have decreased yields and since you aren't certified organic yet, you still get paid conventional prices. Plus the infrastructure in place makes it very easy to go with the flow planting GE corn and using fertilizer and herbicides and much harder to be organic or even non-GE. And even harder if you want to grow something other than corn and soy.
Read more at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/7/10/883207/-We-Are-Screwed

(Update #2) The Creativity Crisis
Excerpt:
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

And
The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

And
Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.
Read more at:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html