The Perfect Factory

That is what I call USA, the perfect factory. A factory in which every member's only focus in life is to work. Gone are the times that one person could feed a whole household. New family members, the kids, are trained early on about the advantages of working hard, about earning money. Equal opportunity and feminism has led the way for man and woman to both leave the sanctuary of home and work. To leave the kids to be trained by the system, to be independent of their family, to make it easier for them as adult to leave and, yes you guess it, to work. We have gone from 1 person feeding a family of five to each person in a family of 5 looking after themselves.

How do you keep such a large group of working people satisfied to work hard from 7-9 am to 4-7 pm everyday, sometimes 6 days a week for a long foreseeable future? Do you pay them enough? No. Do you reward them more time off? No. Do you provide more benefits? No. Do they get a long siesta break at lunch time? Absolutely not, its forbidden.

Hmm. Why then would such a large number of factory workers work so hard, 5-6 days a week, without any real extra benefits? Do they love it? I think not, everyone that I have met meticulously plans their weekends and vacation times, and count down to those days.
Are they drugged or gone mad?
Lets step back for a second. America is the only remaining superpower and every year it reports an economic growth, where as other countries either remain stationary or decline. The only country that seems to be growing comparably at this moment in time seems to be china. This working system is producing results in every field known to mankind at an amazing rate and it is benefiting all of mankind in terms of science and technology, medicine, agriculture.. You name it.

Why is America so powerful and resourceful? Its directly related to its perfect factory where everyones obsession in life seems to be making money, hence working harder.

Back to the question, how do you keep this large group of people working so hard?

You pair hard work with hard entertainment. When your worker comes back home you only have 4-5 hours to recharge him/her before they go to sleep for the next shift. Design ways to remove the stress in the shortest amount of time possible. Hard work needs Hard entertainment. Make some drugs such alcohol, the leading cause of MVA related deaths, cigarettes, the well known cause of cancer, which incidentally has been linked to almost all types of cancer, not only lung, legal. Encourage adultery via TV shows and movies because its ok for marriages to split. It ensures that both couple work. It ensure instability at home, making it preferable for the kids to leave and become full time workers.

Its addictive, this need for Entertainment. Its beneficial to the factory owners. Pay individuals less, take away benefits, increase their working hours, tax them more and what happens? There might be some mumbling, some small groups voicing discontent, who eventually move to other jobs. But there will be no revolt. No changing of the system. Even George Orwell could not see this coming, or maybe he did and I just missed it in his 1984 book.

Am I saying that Americans are addicted to drugs and entertainments? That is a large statement to make and I refuse to make an assumption. What is clear however, is that the days of siesta and short work might be over for the world. After all, this is all about competition, and if you want to compete with the US you have the play by their rules of the game. I guess this is where globalization comes in and as some people say, at this point, globalization equals Americanization.

There are unprecedented movements happening all over the globe right now. Man and woman are working side by side in Iran and Saudi Arabia has allowed women in their parliament. These are the only two extreme changes that I know of, but are signs of changing ways. The globe is moving towards becoming an efficient factory.

Is the American way the way to go? I can't say. But I know this, society was formed by a man and a women forming a family, a nucleus. What are we forming when we become advocates of a perfect factory?

Journalism Without Borders

For those of you who were following and participating in the internet surge of the early 1990s, you might have come across what I am about to describe. For those of you who just began surfing the net, bear with me. I am an avid hockey fan, you cannot live in Canada and not watch hockey. Its just not possible. When I started watching hockey I fell in love with it and with the play of a few of its stars and on a daily basis would surf the net for different post game reports. I used to search ESPN.com, NHL.com, Canoe.com, Slam Hockey, Torontosun.ca, Waymoresports.ca, each told the post game story with a different flavour or twist. It would take me a good part of an hour to read everything out there about my favorite star, Mats Sundin. But there was a growing trend that I came across late 1990s. Every site I visited had the same story. Surfing the web for new stories or different views has became useless. That is unfortunate but not really an important issue when it comes to sports.

What is scary is that this trend has continued into other news categories so that now, there is really only 3 or 4 different views on important subjects. That means that a small group influences or even shapes the opinions of millions of Americans or even North Americans. There was an age old law in the US that was designed for situations like this. It explicitly did not allow for different news agency to amalgamate into one agency. It made sure that Radio stations, Newspaper companies and TV stations remained owned by different groups. That ensured variety in opinions and helped public discussions to be multidimensional. That law was recently (2 to 3 years ago) abolished by hard work from FCC chairman Mike Powell.

What does that mean for the general public? If a community only hears two sides to a story, given as "News" you tend to side with one of them, paving the way for a bipolar community. That is exactly what America has turned into. An amazing nation where its people only believe in the opinions of a few. One might say that internet is changing that, its the balancing factor. That is true. If you goto Google, MSN, and Yahoo you may get other "sides" as well but how long do you think that will last? Isn't it naive to think that this amalgamation will remain localized? At a time in the world where Globalization equals Americanization, these News Agencies will need to garner everyone's opinions to their own. Its not too far fetched to see CNN or Fox News buying stocks of foreign news agencies abroad or even outright owning them, especially in third world countries which tend to have sketchy laws against foreign ownerships.

Unfortunately there will be time in not so distant a future that when you open up internet news agencies, you will read the same news too. That is scary and I can't see that changing. There is a need for people to hear the "other side", a need for journalism to return back to its roots, not to become a celebrity like status. The News that I read and see here in the US is so different, polarized and it is geared towards a mentality of only good and bad, black or white regarding local and world affairs. This has become a Nation of Borderline Disorder (psychiatry term). I used to think how could American's think a certain way about world issues, being that almost every American I've met has been very nice. Now I know they don't have a choice. Do we have a choice? It can be said that other countries employ similar methods, brainwashes their own people as well. Like it or not we are all at the mercy of whomever pulls the string of journalists. There is a need for Journalism Without Borders.