Traveling and my view of what's going on and where we're headed

Here's something I wrote over the summer. It's incomplete, but I'm not motivated to finish it. After reading some stuff Seth Godin has written about exclusionary trade policies, I don't think its necessarily right, though it could be argued that it is partially right, the smaller guys still need to provide excellent service. Either way, I'm not motivated to finish it, so here's what you get.

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Over the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to see a good portion of the Western US. First, my girlfriend and I drove down to the Bay Area (CA), then to the Yosemite area, and back to the tri-cities via Nevada, Eastern Oregon, and Idaho. Just this last weekend we drove to Anaconda, MT, and back (near Butte, MT).

To say that the state of the economy in these places is down is a serious understatement. Across the board, businesses are closed down, and everyone from the business owner on down seem to have a pretty downbeat view of how things are going. I think this is for a couple very legitimate reasons.

The first is that as a whole, you don't increase wealth (in terms of what you actually have, the physical goods, and the buying power for goods down the road) by shuffling paper around. You must do it by manufacturing, and on the whole, we haven't done that for ages. One of the largest sectors of our economy is debt service. This is just a paper shuffle, and you don't increase wealth by filling file boxes full of forms.

In the 50s, "buy union" was big. In the 70s, it was "buy american", from the 90s on, Walmart and their ilk took control of the market, and it was "buy Chinese." I recently saw that their American flag shirts are made in Pakistan, there is something very wrong about that. Everyone thinks that they're saving money by shopping at Walmart, but that's like saying you're saving money by paying with a credit card. Sure, the money in your pocket is more than it would be the other way, but you gotta pay for it down the road.

When you buy a $50 faucet from your Home Depot, you're putting a couple bucks into your local economy, another few into the delivery mechanism (freight companies), probably $15 into HD corporate, and the rest to China. That money's pretty much gone, out of our economy, not creating jobs, not doing a thing to keep food on any american tables. If you buy the $70 faucet, from the small, local outfit, you'll likely put $5 into the freight, $20 into the local economy, and the rest to whatever american factory that produced it, keeping more cash in our economy, and actually producing more wealth for america (we have one more faucet worth of physical goods, while having kept the cash in our borders).

Over the last 20 years, we as a nation have given our approval, through purchases, every time a company has made the decision to outsource the manufacture and support of american goods. Even goods that are made in america are no longer labeled as such, leaving someone to view products as being virtually the same, only separated by price.

The value of education, and what it looks like now and in the future

It is not the big that eat the small, nor the rich that eat the poor, but the informed that eat the ignorant. What have you done lately to stop yourself from resigning to the bottom end of the ever decreasing middle class? Education isn't just letters behind your name, but the ability to gain years of wisdom without the equivalent time with one's nose to the grindstone, not by increasing one's stature, but by standing on the shoulders of giants. If you can name the last three winners of American Idol or Survivor, but don't know who Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, or Warren Buffet are, time to hit the books! What have you done lately to empower yourself for the future?

What else is like religion?

Ok, so this is probably gonna be a rough draft for a while, so if it seems rough, or incomplete, that's why. Feel free to bounce ideas back at me, disagree, etc.

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So I was watching a clip of the new Real World show today, recommended to me by a couple friends. Apparently, one of the characters kinda reminded them of me. Must me the tall black thing. Anyways, there were a couple castmembers discussing their faiths and whatnot, and somehow it came to ask Ty what his opinion was of it (or he just offered). He said that there were good things that church did, but the fact is that their god was not real. This of course set off a couple of the cast members, saying he shouldn't say those things, that he even didn't have a right to, etc.

While I'm sure I (accidentally) can come off like an asshole, I've not been afraid to speak my mind about those things. It's certainly led to some good conversations in the past. But one thing I certainly noticed (and remember from my theistic days) is that people, upon hearing that you don't share their faith, or find their faith to be false, get personally offended. If you were to come out against something else they believe in, like gravity, you'd just be met with incredulity. But in this case, they felt personally attacked when told they were wrong. It seems as if their faith is bolstered by others sharing their faith.

I remember a similar feeling, and I remember thinking to myself when I encountered it that it was pretty odd. What other part of our lives do we silently demand the agreement of others? If I come out stating that I believe cars run better on grapejuice than gasoline, people might try to make sure they heard me correctly, then move on. Only a small sliver of any group of people would get riled up about it. It seems that people, while claiming great faith, even so much as that they know their beliefs are true like any other fact, really have high hopes they're right. It's only through their social network that their faith is reinforced, that they feel justified through the evidence of the number of believers, rather than a number of believers through the evidence.

So, to anyone reading this, what else do you (or people you personally know) get offended about when being told that your views are wrong, or people don't believe the same as you?