I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since our American culture is now almost totally geared around consumer spending. We simply can’t keep the paradigm going if we spend less this year than we did last.
It seems that houses today MUST have master suites with at least 150 square foot closets and 200 square foot bathrooms. The general rule is that the family now needs 1,000 square foot of house for every member. Two kids = 4,000 SF minimum.
But a point of this post is one of the items that kind of sneaked up on me was that apparently, at least to the semi-affluent folks, it is unacceptable for kids to share a bedroom with their siblings! I don’t know when this happened but it crops up on more and more on the house flipper and fixup shows and such that my wife is addicted to. They say every child needs his own room so that he/she can grow their own personality. Now, I know I am going back to the “good old days” when I say I didn’t have a bedroom of my own until I graduated from college. How did I manage to become a real person apart from my siblings and roommates? In other words, I think this new trend reeks of alternate truth. Or maybe it is just another way to continue to consume more and more.
Now finally getting to the main point of this post and that is how China looks at things differently than we do, or at least as the Trump administration does. I would highly recommend a BBC-America TV series entitled “Tales from Modern China”. That series is an eye-opener for how China is doing almost everything right in order to become the next world leader. Their infrastructure improvements dwarfs our and a high percentage of it is in solar/wind/water renewable resources. Of course we know that at least the leadership of our country has decided that this approach is dead wrong.
To see all the giant advances that China has made in the last decade alone makes it pretty obvious they will welcome their new role as world leader and put the US into a follower mode as we did for England. I wonder if all those Evangelicals who put Trump in office will ever realize the mistake they made. But more importantly, I wonder if all those who stayed home on election day will realize the mistake they made.
Is is too late to reverse this trend. Maybe… maybe not…
Caterpillar Tractors and such are very much a part of my search of America. So, when I was near Peoria Illinois recently I had to stop in at their museum at the headquarters building. What I found amazed me. I never realized the size of much of their equipment.
The above words come from an old Simon and Garfunkel song entitled “59th Street Bridge Song” otherwise known as Feelin Groovy. Even in the 1960s many people thought that life was just moving too fast. Can you image what they might think about today?
I will admit up front here that I didn’t spend as much time in Quincy IL as I planned. There are about a thousand historical homes in this small town but I will only feature one of them in this post. Quincy is one of many towns along the mighty Mississippi River and of course that mean it is steeped in history. Villa Kathrine, which is the subject of today is perhaps the most unusual one.
When our government was formed over three hundred and fifty years ago the founders were concerned about someone usurping total power. To prevent that they wisely instituted a pretty severe form of checks and balances. No one person or group of persons could take over without trampling their newly formed constitution. That was a good thing and it still is today.
Mr. Trump seems to thinks he is a autocratic king with all his daily signing ceremonies, many of which are totally meaningless. He seems to believe all he has to do is to sign a document with his lavish signature and it will happen. (Why does he think we need to see his signature each and every time?) 🙂
