I can explain suicide to you. It's as simple as an analog TV's antenna.
Some people are lucky--the manufacturer delivers the set ready to watch straight out of the box. The antennas stick up in exactly the right places, making it easier to stay close to home.
Others, not so lucky. Their antennas need adjusting for a clear picture, or they'll only get static. Most of the time, though, it works so life goes on.
The rest? Companies call them defective, defying QC. These TV owners keep adjusting their antennas because the pictures and sounds, when they come through, are the brightest and most interesting in the neighborhood.
And only this TV, this antenna, could show you the world from a Colombian barrio rooftop, a Vietnamese restaurant with plastic chairs, and a tiled floor with foul-smelling Icelandic fermented shark.
But the antenna, as we mentioned, is defective. No one knows the right adjustments, and nothing dampens its signal. Its sharpness captures every smell, every song note, and every person (especially his first love). It's all in there somewhere, jostling around, looking for a place to call home, until one day, he decides the cacophony is too much, too bright, too much.
He turns it off.
Dedicated to Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)
by Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018)
America's debt-fueled economic model is incompatible with merit and possibly tolerance once we account for physical and educational segregation. A debtor democracy cannot succeed without new immigrants and/or new residents willing to contribute to ensure existing and new debts roll over. As with America's entitlement programs, its political structure is geared not towards resolution of problems but using debt to pass responsibility to future generations.
Outsiders fail to appreciate how much American inequality and de facto segregation are premised on assumptions of meritocracy. When almost 50% of your population is without significant assets in a debtor democracy, the foundation cracks, causing the younger generation to question capitalism and other values. In short, at the same time the status quo needs to be preserved in order to repay debt, the younger generation has every incentive to break its shackles. We have arrived at this troublesome scenario in large part because of the ways debt and the tax code, especially the mortgage interest tax deduction, have promoted segregation.
Rather than attempting to fix segregation in ways that identify deserving residents, America's government has outsourced the task of social cohesion to private schools and private banking institutions--with one notable exception. A teenager poorly educated has little choice but to rely on parental connections--increasingly tenuous as segregation increases--or join America's military, the sole entity the federal government has decided is worthy of its direct involvement in identifying talent.
Consider a society where the government borrows virtually unlimited money to promote a program heavily biased in favor of men while using the men in increasingly meaningless ways as wartime readiness favors technology, economic agreements, and diplomacy over brawn and manpower. Such a society will inevitably create tensions between its banking sector--and, by default, the private sector--and its government by issuing bonds and inviting foreign investment in ways that favor the status quo over residents' well-being. In a dictatorship, such an approach may be viable; in a democratic republic, it is suicide. Welcome to America in 2018.
