I know I'm a day late with this, but I just ran across this article in my feedly today, and there is so much to think about, I had to share it. Rod Dreher writes a review of Sam Quinones' Dreamland, and excerpted a few passages with good analysis as well. I'm linking to Dreher's article, and reposting one of Quinones' excerpts. I'm still thinking about it, because I think it speaks to my longing for a simple life, and perhaps identifies some of the roots of this longing in me.
"In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.
In fact, the United States achieved something like this state of affairs … in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. When I returned home from Mexico in those years, I noticed a scary obesity emerging. It wasn’t just the people. Everything seemed obese and excessive. Massive Hummers and SUVs were cars on steroids. In some of the Southern California suburbs near where I grew up, on plots laid out with three-bedroom houses in the 1950s, seven-thousand-square-foot mansions barely squeezed between the lot lines, leaving no place in which to enjoy the California sun.
More:
Excess contaminated the best of America. Caltech churned out brilliant students, yet too many of them now went not to science but to Wall Street to create financial gimmicks that paid off handsomely and produced nothing. Exorbitant salaries, meanwhile, were paid to Wall Street and corporate executives, no matter how poorly they did. Banks packaged rolls of bad mortgages and we believed Standard & Poor’s when they called them AAA. Well-off parents no longer asked their children to work when they became teenagers.
In Mexico, I gained a new appreciation of what America means to a poor person limited by his own humble origins. I took great pride that America had turned more poor Mexicans into members of the middle class than had Mexico. Then I would return home and see too much of the country turning on this legacy in pursuit of comfort, living on credit, attempting to achieve happiness through more stuff. And I saw no coincidence that this was also when great numbers of these same kids — most of them well-off and white — began consuming huge quantities of the morphine molecule, doping up and tuning out."
I can see why this is so riveting. My husband grew up on land and had to work hard at farming (it was a hobby farm but one that they worked hard on). I can see so much how this helped form who he is today. Having kids not work and have no responsibility, etc, is quite dangerous. Thanks for the article.
ReplyDeleteI think it is more than just hard work--the idea that life should be free from pain, and that every moment must be pleasurable is quite insidious. I think that notion drives much of the excess we see today. I find it interesting that churches emptied around the time that this idea gained widespread traction. We are a spiritual people, empty and looking for God to fill us. Lord have mercy.
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