>Is the American Dream Killing You?
>Someone builds a gigantic house next door; after six months, you and your neighbor haven't even said hello. You walk into your local junior high (where his daughter was a student), and it looks like something out of hell: nose rings, boys showing their underwear, girls with T-shirts that say HO! on them, and others that sport MEGADEATH. Kids with hoods over headphones, with gangsta rap leaking through them: "All flowing past you in the hallways like sea wreckaage, all that is left after the ship goes down."
>You then drop your daughter off, after hardly having spoken to her, and drive to work. On the way you see an electronic sign that broadcasts the latest Threat Level from Homeland Security. You reflect on the fact that the nation's capital used to have a crack user as a mayor, and that he later returned, elected to the city council.
>Now you are in the CEO's office with the rest of the management team. "You are polite, of course, but...you know too much to respect the man who runs the corporation. You know he is out for himself, that he has formed a small cabal at the top to leverage the entire company for their own personal gain....The CEO makes over five hundred times what the average person in the company makes, but this is normal in America today, where the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily for thirty years, and is now the widest in all the rich democracies, on par with the third world."
>After the meeting you walk through the company, acknowledge those you pass by, "but it is nothing but the nod between jousters. Office relationships are like business as a whole: pleasant on the surface, deadly underneath." Nothing makes sense, life's purpose eludes you, you can't trust anyone. The market economy has the power "to run your life, harm your health, fragment your family, dumb down society, destroy the environment, incite global conflict, and displace God himself."