Because We’re Still Americans
So, our self proclaimed elites (Despite their ivy league degrees, I’ve yet to see one of them who could make it into/through the lowest ranked community college without connections/special considerations/money/help. And I doubt their ability to get through the day without minders.) have decided what they need is a more compliant populace and like the infernal racists they are, they think they can get that by importing people with a darker skin shade.
It worries me and others – and it should – not because of the skin shade of those being imported (bites back very strongly on pungent remark about other elites who thought it was okay to import dark skinned people to do what the elites wanted them to. History repeats first as tragedy and then as farce. We’re in the farce portion) but because of the reasons they’re being imported. It’s bad enough when your government is importing people to do “what Americans aren’t willing to do” at a time when Americans are willing to take any job at all, if only the government will let them contract for work without interposing itself with regulations and demands for paperwork. It’s much worse when your government is advertising abroad all the benefits you can get at the expense of the US taxpayer, if you will just move here and refuse to or can’t work.
It worries us because quite bluntly, our society is having enough trouble looking after those who have fallen through the net. The fact that the economic wounds are largely self-inflected doesn’t make them any less painful. I don’t believe there are people who don’t have anything to offer society in the way of meaningful labor, but there are quite a few who can’t measure up when you weigh against their labor having to pay minimum wage. Most people with some experience are worth minimum wage, but most kids – even smart kids – aren’t. Sorry, it’s a fact of life. They have to learn things like punctuality and that their wants that day count less than the job. Until then, very few of them are worth minimum wage. And frankly, none of them is when you count in stuff like the paperwork required to have an employee, the regulations that must be satisfied, and the matching Social Security contributions. (If you don’t have an employee you have no idea. It’s almost a full time job complying with everything. Frankly, even for a part time employee. I could afford to pay someone, half time, to help with secretarial and management. But then I’d have to hire them full time to do their own paperwork, and that I can’t afford.)
I favor, as I’ve said before, instead of minimum wage some type of assistance program where people working full time are given enough to make up what they’d get if they were working minimum wage. (Favor in a manner of speaking. I’m a libertarian who thinks all taxation is theft. But of the things I CAN get, I think that would distort the market least.)
The other thing that worries us – or at least worries me – is that culture isn’t plastic. No, it is not hereditary. No, you’re not stuck living with the culture of your ancestors because you wee born that way. If I adopted a little girl from China tomorrow, she would be more Hoyt than anything else, by the time she got to be 18. (And if I won the lottery tomorrow I would. And… poor kid. Maybe that’s why I never win the lottery/become a bestseller.)
Culture is acquired from your parents and your environment. Most of it is acquired at pre verbal times. (Yes, it might link in with certain hereditary characteristics, but the BS in biology down the hall tells me the human genome is too complex for us to determine that. Are the kids slightly more unorganized than they should be because their mom is Portuguese-born, or because they were raised by a writer mom who is likely to forget stuff like meals while she’s working? — I’ll note in passing that for Portuguese culture I’m almost unreal in my clock-work like organization, and that I was often accused of being German. I’ll also note from what I see I’m about medium for the US, except that I’m trying to do six jobs at once.) You can change how you react and how you interact with people VOLATIONALLY. This is called acculturating. I did it more or less on purpose, but it is more complex than it sounds, and it required things such as stopping reading in Portuguese (though part of that might have been needed only because I wanted to write in English, and sound American. There is a different tempo to the Portuguese narration. Never mind.) Most people who come here, even the ones who want to become American, can’t or aren’t willing to do that. They seek the comfort of their hometown newspaper, back home. Or, now that there’s the internet, they stay linked to family via email on a daily basis.
I don’t know how that last will affect it, but I know that most people used to take three generations to integrate. How that works now, particularly with the enshrining of victimhood, and particularly if you’re a darker shade of skin (even if it’s a very light brown like the boys) I can’t tell you, but I suspect it’s harder.
It is a human thing to use what excuse you have ready to hand to explain away your failures, even when the person you’re explaining them to is yourself. It also gives you a bad incentive not to try as hard.
I suspect a lot of people will glump through life, demanding all the special perks because they’re “victims” and refusing to accept that they might not be working as hard as others, because after all “systemic racism” and “white male privilege.” (These same people, in a more traditional system, like, say, Islam, would accuse genii of cursing them. Do genii exist? Probably not, but in that society people believe them, and it provides an excuse. The same with “Systemic racism” and “white male privilege.”)
This makes the importation of a large contingent into our society at best problematic and at worst dangerous. The Tsarnaev brothers were after all just such immigrants, nurtured by us on social security and resentment. (And they are, btw, whiter than I. Religion is culture but culture is not race.)
I don’t know why the elites want this. Oh, some of them, definitely want a new electorate and have illusions of bringing in a contingent used to quasi-feudal rule because they fancy themselves as the new rulers of the new peons. Others of course feel guilty. They know that if they’d been thrown into an inner city high school with no connections, no help, not only would they not have survived, but they would never have managed to learn enough to graduate. They also know that by the standards of thirty years ago, they have a ninth grade education if that. In other words, like everyone whose success wasn’t earned, they want to atone. Frankly, I wish like medieval rulers they just build Cathedrals. It would be both more aesthetically pleasing and, ultimately, better for society. (All societies. Mexico thinks it’s unloading its lowest levels of society on us, and getting money back to boot, but they’ll find in time that when you export your “lower class” you also export those more likely to innovate. Or maybe for them that’s a plus. They’ve been stagnant how long?)
However the China-lust of our ruling class (“We should be more like China. They know how to get things done”) leads me to believe the main idea is that them little brown peoples are more subservient, and if we had more of them we could do things more like China, by main force and command. (I did say that our elites are racist, right?)
… And they’re going to fail.
I want you to step back from that ledge, I want you to take a deep breath, and I want you to know, to the bottom of your heart, to the tip of their toes that the “New Electorate Project” is going to flop.
I’ve given you some of the reasons, two days ago. First, the self-deportation process is well under way. You can see it in what’s stocked in your area. You can see it just walking around the street. (It might not be as complete in some areas, and some areas were more taken over when it started and it will take longer to SEE the difference. Also, of course, in rural areas it will linger longer, because I know for a fact most farms simply cannot survive without illegal labor (see minimum wage/regulations/paperwork. The margin the farms operate on is not that wide.) However, most people have noticed a difference, even if it’s unreported.
Yes, the “legalization” will be huge on paper, but I doubt most of those people intend to live here – they just want to file for social security/disability.
This of course means those systems crash fast. (They’re already on the verge of crashing.) Part of the “importing a new electorate” project assumes that the blue model goes on forever, and that payments are secure and unlimited. It ain’t so. My generation came of age knowing we’d never see a cent from social security. It’s gotten worse. It’s gotten bad enough that those getting money from social security might not be able to much longer. I think that at some point we do triage and give minimum only to those who need it absolutely to survive. No, I don’t WANT this – it’s just inevitable, with a falling birth rate. And no, importing illiterate workers doesn’t help. This is not the twenties. There are no great factories waiting for them to walk in and work on.
And that’s a good thing, of course. By and large this country has dispensed with dangerous, labor-intensive work – except in farms, though even then it’s been lessened.
But it’s also a hint of things to come. When I was born, mid-twentieth century we had some innovations and things had gotten cheaper, but the world would have made perfect sense to someone born a century earlier. (Particularly where I lived.) You could take someone from the nineteenth century and plunk them down in the middle of the twentieth, and after some adjustment, they’d go “oh, right, motors are different, carriages have motors, blah blah” but the structure of life would make perfect sense. There would be homes, families, hospitals, schools, factories, office buildings. Once they adapted to the minor tech innovation (and humans are very adaptable.) they’d “get” what was going on well enough.
Now… not so sure. We’re only at the beginning, so they’d still identify a lot of things, of course, and they’d fail to see the significance of the fact that you can communicate instantly, in real time around the world. They’d think it was just a “neat” thing. A lot of people today think that too.
Part of that is because we’re just at the beginning of the revolution. It’s hitting my business first, so I can tell you it’s dispensing with factories, with warehouses, with centralized distribution. It’s a HUGE change.
The change is coming to other fields. Schools are dead, but still walking. Most factories, too, once three-d printing gets going.
Am I saying technology will save us?
Oh, my Lord NO!
Rapid change brings on upheaval. The last change almost (but not) this fast gave us… the French Revolution and its sisters around the world.
It’s going to get rough. It’s going to get really rough. At the end of this where you live will mean far less than where you work, and the two might be half a world apart.
Does this mean territorial location and territorial nations will mean nothing? Well, no. It means stuff we can’t even imagine yet, but not that. After all, my friends are around the world, my publisher is in North Carolina, but I am still affected by a disaster in my area, and how my neighbors live still matters.
What it means, though, is that people will be increasingly more free. The territorial government will mean something, but not as much as it used to: labor regulations/welfare/laws about what you can’t and can’t do for a living – all of this means much less when you can live one place and work the other. The same for what you can do for play. The same for the interest rate that controls what home you can buy. Regional jurisdictions, like NYC who rely on a highly paid work force are going to be upended, because people can work there and live elsewhere. The same, writ large goes for national governments.
I have no idea, none, what the world will look like at the end of this. And neither do you. And neither does anyone else. So called “futurists” are usually missing ten or twenty little points that could be all that determines the future.
But I do know one thing: where you live will still matter, as a locus of culture, law enforcement and neighborliness.
And I know another thing: we’re likely to come out on top. We’re likely to come out on top for the same reason that our elites want a new electorate – because we’re not a normal nation.
We’re the descendants of those who left everything, who acculturated to become something new united not by blood, not by tribe, but by the words of the constitution.
The constitution is more flexible than tribe or blood. The constitution was forged to meet circumstances no one could have foreseen, a new world, new ways of doing things. It was a document supposed to underlie a nation as tough as granite, as flexible as steel. A creature the world had never seen.
There is a reason that for the last hundred years, the future has come from America. Even when inventions are made elsewhere, they are applied and popularized here.
We Americans are more flexible than those who chose to stay behind.
The cowards never left, the weak died on the way and the pusillanimous went back, tail between their legs. (As will many of the new ones, when the teat goes dry.)
Those who became American are crazy people, ready for any challenge.
We are a people of the future. The future can’t scare us because it’s where we come from. We are impatient for it to arrive, curious about what it will bring, excited about our opportunities in it.
Let the elites rule and mandate. You concentrate on what you can do that they never thought of. You create a future they can’t comprehend, much less affect.
Step back from that ledge. You’re an American and you belong to the future.
NOTE: If you’re interested in the future of SF, you should also read Amanda Green’s post at Mad Genius Club: Why?
