And the wolf finally came

Why I wasn’t too surprised with the results of Nov. 8, 2016: The exportation of America’s industrial manufacturing economy, circa 1980 to present, which included:

The demise of reliable longterm industrial employment for the skilled and unskilled;

The demise of corporate provided employee health care for the skilled and unskilled;

The demise of corporate provided employee pensions for the skilled and unskilled;

Corporate disregard for civic obligation;

In essence, the exportation of the American middle class to far, far off lands.

Consider this once-mighty American way replaced with these fabulous imports:

The service economy, providing low-wage work for the masses because better choices are few: Wal-Mart jobs, Home Depot jobs, Amazon warehouse jobs, Omni Hotels and Resorts mop and laundry jobs, Whole Food jobs, or what few will be left after the recent sellout;

The information economy, flooding the ill-educated with delusions of fakery and alternate denials;

The gig economy: house-sitting jobs, taxi cab jobs and other “rugged individualism” jobs;

The bingo economy, e.g., Bethlehem Steel paved over for a spectacular casino parking lot;

The gun economy, comforting America with more guns than jobs so you can pay your rent with an Uzi;

The prison and deportation economy, providing America with state, federal and privatized jobs with paid vacations, paid health care, paid pensions, like in the good old industrial days.

Political myopia is a peculiar national civil disease, seemingly reoccurring roughly once per decade: 1954 — first McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee hearings; 1962 — first U.S. combat mission in Vietnam; 1972-74 — Watergate; 1980-1990s — America rids itself of its industrial manufacturing economy; 2003 — U.S. invasion of Iraq; 2013 — Supreme Court suspends significant clauses of the Voting Rights Act.

I have lived through all of these. And in 2017, this feverish delirium is higher than it has been in my lifetime.