It is an amazing thing that we are in a new year and already moving toward the middle of month 1. A new decade ahead and perhaps the millennium celebrations being ten years behind us are difficult to recall already so much has transpired in the first ten years of the new century. It seems as though we have been at war forever, so many lives lost, so much treasure spoiled and spent.
The economic morass seems to be swirling downward instead of calming. Each thing I pay for this new year costs me more than only two weeks ago and yet there does not seem to be good news about improving conditions from any sector. More deficits at the state level, ongoing problems with mortgages, local stores that have been established for many decades are closing their doors for good.
The decade ahead appears to hold much less promise than the one we entered ten years ago. The problems of the world have expanded, heated to boiling by war, poverty, hatred, the pot has bubbled over hissing angry fire below the pot.
Poverty unresolved by a wealthy west is unlikely to be addressed by a less-wealthy west. So as we retract our philanthropy, as we put out wallets away indefinitely, government is forced to shrink or to find new ways to tax, charity is closer to home.
I see the homeless on the street, people who I wouldn’t have pegged as such with cardboard signs begging along the sidewalks, numbers increasing. The need to share from a shrinking pot will be the challenge of the new decade. The need to give sacrificially will challenge our abundance mentality.
Perhaps the culture of me will have to be replaced with a culture of us, beginning with family. Perhaps the strength of families will be encouraged and grow roots that we haven’t seen recently in America.
The expectations of the new millennium ten years ago was characterized by a falsely inflated sense of wealth and power built on irresponsible spending and casual credit. The optimism was fueled by a sense of security and invincible apartness that was destroyed by 9-11. Nothing that happened since 9-11 has rebuilt the enthusiasm and hope for the future with the brief exception of the election of our first African American President – who will forever suffer from the low delivery on unrealistic expectations, attached to him by a people grasping at the last straws of ethereal hope as the façade of our wealth fell stone by stone.
If the second law of thermodynamics that says all systems progress to maximum entropy is true, then I wonder about the American system and whether the energy wasted around the world on wars and on stabilizing governments for the sake of business interests is a sign that our system is in disorder and thereby moving toward maximum entropy.
Are we simply dispersing our resources into less productive systems without creating anything? Heat lost as entropy does not produce anything but hot air, no work is achieved. Is this what we’re actually doing in places like Afghanistan where the energy of America is not spontaneously flowing to foreign lands, but is intentionally being sent there in the form of war and aid, i.e., work; the result is the same, our energy flows to less productive governments (cooler systems) and is lost when no work is achieved, entropy.
Would America be wiser to keep its energy at home? Or do we continue to have an optimism that wealth will return in the next decade and that it does not matter how much energy we disburse offshore? This is obviously flawed policy because it presumes that there is an endless supply of resources and that those wasted (entropy) are unimportant. It seems to me that the principle of entropy would infer that at the very least we’re dissipating some of our energy/resources to no impact and that dissipation will continue until maximum entropy is reached, or until resources are evenly distributed across all contacted systems.
Happy New Year!
