You are members of a teensy minority within a sea of the disinterested, the Very-easily amused - many of whom view 'shopping' as a near-daily recreation / also as placebo for an Authentic\ufffd^? life experience. Apparently the endorphins generated by the moments of the Buy-Buy frenzy aka POS, momentarily distracts from the deeper emotional poverty within the jelloware -- which lugubriously surfaces later, and is called (an epidemic now, I hear) depression.
[pardon the technical description; beats saying, puerile Assholes!! a lot.]

Where are the Stateswomen?
Conventional wisdom conflates their absence with 'the failing educational system'.
Trite non-specific - easily herringed-Red. I'd gussy that up a bit, substituting homogenization as the main culprit - massively abetted by the acceleration of robot-like machines, their 'efficiency' and its appeal to the MBA crowd - who know the price of everything, yada; (MBAs are drawn from the mediocre.. having failed the larger aim) - and who remain ignorant of history and of those things once called aspirations - except in the amassing of $$, natch.

For humans to settle for incarceration in oppressive rectilinear pens - call that an Office and say, I want to be a businessperson and live there! - does, I think hint-at some root causes of the automaton-behavior migrating from the rilly-Profitable Machines ('cause they eliminate paying humans to Work - in any honorable, historically-imperative sense of Work!)

The inexorable retraining of humans to asymptotically approach Machine Efficiency, that homogenization now suffuses Both worlds: passing osmotically across the thinner-than-ever man|machine conceptual barrier. I wot.

Who has time to read a (several?) 500-1000 pp. elderly work of Wisdom, ponder [in silence! - it used to be called Solitude]: when exhausted by the daily dehumanizing process - which began in the driveway, the creeping lines of mobile-stereo-dens enroute to:

Incarceration, then paper-generating, pushing, shredding, biz-lying -- and the necessary pretense that, "Hey, I'm doing Important work here: See?! how busy I always Am?"

It took lots more than some {fancied} deterioration in the enthusiasm, talent, Dedication of the Teachers of the Place -???- to set this dehumanizing trend into full acceleration. (Today they are required to teach craftiness, the sly innuendo of biz-lying: not the Classics. Remember those?)

It took the morphing-into, embracing of Vulture Ethics-free Capitalism / or by any other academic name we love to invent, to lend credence. How does one ever put such a Behemoth into Reverse?

Nuke and start all over? -- has unpleasant side effects, but our sloth and reduced-Imaginations of possibilities may actually make this the most likely scenario. All 'spasm-war' [a watchword of the '50s - still brand-New] needs is a few more years of Shrubbish being taken for 'governments of the people, by the yada'. And continued somnolence by the maxxed-out, frazzled CC holders.

Are we half-way there or just ___? Let's also heed the Loonies who fervidly tell us about the prevert+committee who, after much bad acid cobbled up Revelations!-cha-cha, shall we? - many of The Lost are on this potent mind-eating drug. Sick-fantasy does not help reverse any behemoths either, I also wot.



On the cheery side though, Piet Hein informs us that,
Things that don't actually kill you outright, generally make you stronger :-) :-) Yeay!!!


Yabut - what if it's an epidemic of lobotomies?
Ooops - got a large tome to read w/ a cat-in-lap - Murica is today a rilly depressing thing to peer very closely at.. y'know?