Jim Kunstler : "You Can't Over-Estimate The Damage We've Done To Ourselves"

Do you know your place? In these days of hysterical Wokesterism, the question would surely provoke a riot of cowbell-clanging Antifa cadres, fainting spells in the congressional black caucus, and gravely equivocal op-eds from David Brooks of The New York Times. Yet it’s a central, unacknowledged quandary of our time that so many Americans have no place and suffer terribly from it.

Human beings need a place in the social order, in the economic order, and in actual geography in order to function optimally in a life fraught with the normal challenges and difficulties that reality presents.

It’s a fact that most Americans live in everyday environments that are, at best, not worth caring about, and at worst actively punishing to human neurology. Have you taken a good look at the American landscape and townscape lately? How do you feel venturing down the six-lane commercial boulevards lined with cartoon architecture? Either anxious or numb, would be my guess. Or a Main Street of empty storefronts? Or an avenue of looming, despotic glass skyscrapers? Or a vast subdivision of identical McHouses where the buffalo once roamed? Is it any wonder that Americans require more antidepressant medication than people in other lands? Or, that failing to find treatment, they self-medicate with alcohol, opiates, sugary snacks, and anything else that takes them out of the soul-crushing reality of their surroundings.

I don’t think you can overstate the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the sheer material arrangement of our national life. A decade ago, I sat in on many zoning board meetings called to approve new WalMarts and other chain-stores around my region of upstate New York and southern Vermont. Inevitably, the companies organized a claque of locals in the meeting hall — itself a depressing, low-ceilinged chamber of cinder blocks and fluorescent lighting — to fill the seats and yell in support of “bargain shopping.”

That was some bargain they got. The chain-stores got approved and the Main Streets died, but that wasn’t the end of it. This dynamic also destroyed networks that gave local citizens an economic and social place. Locally owned business people were the caretakers of the town. They took care of two buildings — their place of business and their home. They sat on library, school, and hospital boards and donated money to running local institutions. They employed people who lived in town and there were consequences for treating them well or badly. There was even a time in this country when local business people wouldn’t dare to put up an insultingly ugly building.

A lot of this economic behavior has produced the social perversities of our time. Exterminating an entire class of local merchants has eliminated the heart of the American middle-class and grotesquely concentrated the nation’s wealth among corporate leviathans who comprise one percent of the population. It also eliminated the place where young people learned how to do business, preparing themselves to try ventures of their own, and to make a place for themselves in the world.

What is your place now? A cubicle in the marketing department of Old Navy? An aisle in the Home Depot? A desk in the Diversity and Inclusion office of some State University, pushing to sort the student population into racial and sexual categories because all other ways of belonging in society are gone? Or do you occupy ten square feet of sidewalk with a tarp and a shopping cart? None of those places are liable to furnish a personal sense that life is worth living.

Those of you out there still sincerely clamoring for “change” might start asking yourselves if you have a clue about finding a place worth caring about in this country and what it might actually take to get there, including the revision of a lot of ideas in your head that you take for granted. Hint: if you’re looking for it in the current political leadership you are probably wasting your time and energy. If you’re looking for it in some group identity, you may not ever discover the power in your own individual ability to make choices for yourself.

Kuntsler is right to be concerned about the stripping of our towns’ local businesses and their replacement with cookie-cutter giants.

And you my friend identify what is lost: power.

Kuntsler is right on this point:

“Yes, “progress” is inevitable, but the author is correct that the structure, ownership, and design of modern businesses, roads, and communities can be soul-robbing and stultifying. He should have also added the smothering nature of everybody having to bow before the Great God in far away Washington DC.”

The movement of commercial power away from the integrated fabric of our communities, is just like the movement of political power over EVERYTHING to Washington D.C.

The further away from you that a power resides, the less influence and control you have with that power.

When your neighbor’s kid works at the local Costco, there is not the same sense of connection as when your neighbor’s kid works for the local hardware store owned by the guy who is one of the lay leaders at your church.

Towns are still towns today, but many are no longer “communities”.

There was a reason our founders tried to keep the range of the federal government’s operations small which was part of the same reason why they wanted a federal constitutional republic and not a “democracy”.

Democracy - full fledged one man one vote on everything - only works in small jurisdictions. As the range of a democracy’s writ covers too much territory, it quits working in the interest of the people, as its power becomes wielded by a tyrannical majority against the “common people”. Just think of the bi-coastal majorities running everything across the whole U.S. with no structural impediments to them doing so. THAT is what the backers of a “national popular vote” for president do not understand. They do not understand that a nation is not a mere body count of how many people you can add up. It is farms, villages, towns, cities, counties, states and regions, and THEN, only then do we see the people that reside in them. Each of those PLACES is part of what makes the “nation”, more than any “national majority”. You look at a county by county map of the results of the last presidential election and you see it. The “nation” is a sea of GOP red, with some fringes and ribbons of blue within it.

Ignoring places IS ignoring the people in them. A center, whether it be a Rome, or a Washington D.C. cannot hold, when the role of the center becomes just telling everyone else to just shut up and do as their told. The rest of the “nation” sees the center of power is not them, not theirs. The Democrats represent that central, just shut up and do as your told, power.

Giant corporate monopoly business models do the same thing as big government, they just operate through a different element, the commercial as opposed to the governmental.

We have a grocery store chain here in New York/New Jersey.

It’s model has worked very well.

It began decades ago, in the 1940s. It was a struggling period for grocers. Some New Jersey grocers were having trouble getting good wholesale prices for the goods they sold. The Del Monte company approached a group of them and suggested they form a cooperative company, as the buying unit for all of them. By making larger orders with the major suppliers, they’d get better wholesale discounts. They would each be individual store owners and operators with a share in the buying outfit they formed. That’s what they did, and that’s what they sill are today.

There are many Shop Rite owners. Some own a single store and some own a number of stores, but they are not owned by the company they cooperatively own as the buyer for all of them. There is no corporate architect, no corporate HR department, real estate manager, ect., ect.

And you know what you find in every Shop Rite store I know of? Tons of employees - way, way more than any other super market chain. And none of the Shop Rite stores have “self-check-out”, and they all have the best prices you can find. That all sounds very nice, but it is actually amazing (the number of employees), as I know, continuing as far back as the 1960s and still today, the average net profit of supermarkets is between $.01 and $.03 on each dollar of revenue.

Maybe that would be the better business model for all sorts of retailing - not cookie cutter corporate stores, just a buying cooperative for lots of independent stores selling the same kind of goods. I think the Ace Hardware stores use that business model. In the midwest I saw some Ace Hardware stores with store foot prints and volume of offerings in competition with Home Depot and Lowes.

The chain-stores got approved and the Main Streets died, but that wasn’t the end of it. This dynamic also destroyed networks that gave local citizens an economic and social place. Locally owned business people were the caretakers of the town. They took care of two buildings — their place of business and their home. They sat on library, school, and hospital boards and donated money to running local institutions. They employed people who lived in town and there were consequences for treating them well or badly. There was even a time in this country when local business people wouldn’t dare to put up an insultingly ugly building.

Yes, but in affluent suburbia people were already "delocalized." People with money and no connection to the place moved in and didn't care about local business or other local things. They were strangers already and losing locally-owned shops didn't bother them. They would also be the ones who took over those local boards, at least until their company transferred them to another city.

In rural areas where there wasn't a lot of money floating around the effects must have been more traumatic. In communities where you can only rely on yourself and those around you, losing downtown meant losing connections, losing a world, and maybe losing hope, something wealthy suburbanites didn't have to worry about.

In cities where upscale newcomers move in, the effect may have been the opposite: gentrification may bring more small local shops, at least of a sort and at least for a time. Those shops don't provide the kind of continuity and opportunities for connection that the old small town shops did, and they don't last too long, given rising rents in gentrifying areas.

People didn't always like the old small town proprietors, though -- the ones who would hover around customers and chase kids out of the store if they stayed too long reading the comic books. The kind of stares that strangers got from the locals were also off-putting. I recognize truth in his argument, but there was another side to how things were.

Although it is not agreement with thoughts of some FReepers, there are globalists and then there are globalists.

Those seeking a world government are globalists. Those engaged in trade internationally trade all over the globe but are not globalists.

Americans have always been engaged in trade that was pretty much global. Americans were and are the Yankee Traders.

President Jefferson engaged the African Arabs over trade freedom. The US Marines went to engage our enemy in Tripoli. The US Navy opened diplomatic and trade relations early on with Japan. Since, and actually before the founding, American salesmen have been knocking on foreign doors hawking American goods.

The Pat Buchanan anti everything brigadiers are currently out in force demanding we return to the isolationist Republican party that died with WWII. They have little or no concept of what Americans do in their trade endeavors all round the world, constantly 24/7/365. They have no concept of just how many different jobs are involved in one measly Million $$$ export sale.

In my mind, the global government globalism is primarily a European cancer metastasized into some American minds. I do not see an uprising support for a global government from Singapore, or Japan, or Korea, or Thailand or Indonesia or Australia, or even China.

The business of America is business and we are free to go where ever they will allow us to come to knock on doors and peddle our products.

That’s who we are ant that’s what we do....... and we do it exceptionally well. President Trump is in business to enhance our efforts and develop better and greater success

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