July 4th 2011

When I was child we would go to Italy for vacation to see family and sometimes on July 4th we would go to Pinzolo, the town of my Grandfather for the fourth of July. Pinzolo was known for two things creating missionaries and priests and exporting knife grinders to the world. All over the world there are Pinzolo knife grinders today and many of them had returned to the town of their birth to retire and open businesses. It was always funny to me to hear them talk. They all had different accents. My grandfather had a New York accent but there were grinders from Australia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and South Africa but they would gather for the fourth and they built a memorial in Pinzolo to their efforts. The thing that made me proudest is that these people had done so much with their lives and they were full of hope.

The Fourth of July for them was a day of hope.

I fear that that hope has been extinguished. It is not political it is just a fact. In the USA that hope that anything is possible and that if you work hard and try to save and build you will be rewarded had been destroyed by a global system that rewards cleverness over hard work and which in the end has destroyed the greatest economic story of human history. It is evident to me that the hope that my 19 year old grandfather had sharpening knives during the depression in Brooklyn does not exist anymore in the USA. We are victims now of a global financial system that does not care for his kind of anachronistic vision.

This sadness and lack of hope pervades the United States. Some of it is manifest by Tea Partiers and others by Leftists but watch MSNBC ior FOX for a evening and what you get is negative, hopeless and sad. Where is the America of John Glenn? Where is the America of my grandfather coming to America and when he died be had worked hard and lived a good life and built something?

That America has been killed by a theory.

America was never a "Free Market" nation. That was what Britain was. We were always a nation that allowed small markets and local people work really hard to build something but over time conservatives had made bigger better and more free to exploit so we de industrialized and in the end we became two nations one educated and the other in "service".
College had become a life long expense where a family can almost never pay for it and where students amass tens of thousands in debt not allowing them to ever follow their dreams. And those who are protected like corporate titans and union workers sit in their gains keeping out the rest.

America in 2011 looks more like Brazil in 1950 and Brazil in 2011 looks more like America in 1950. It is the fault of the class that runs America both left and right and if they do not change what is happening it is going to make Greek and British riots look like child's play.

American hopefullness and dream is ending and what will replace it?