Miami Sch-mmmiami

Did you know that Miami has ceased to be a city?  It's true. According to Miami locals, the city has gone bankrupt and has been assumed by Dade County.   The primary demographic that lives in the city has money (and lots of it) and they spend and spend, however none in that same demographic work.  So somehow, this has created a huge gap, and the lack of tax dollars recirculating into the city has created a situation in which Miami has been unable to pay city bills.  So politically, it is merely a place full of separate villages that exist within Dade County.

Interesting.  So based on this small amount of information, an assumption can be made that poor, non-working social exploiters are equally met by rich hyperconsumers when it comes to the issues of our unsustainable economically crippled market.

Which leads down that long and windy road of all the issues that consumerism manifests itself into huge cultural problems.  However in this situation, it may not be the act of consumerism itself that is harmful, but the "wrong" perceptions that Americans have towards what it is, and the consequences that arise from this type of behavior. 

In a research possibility for one of my classes, I'm beginning to peer down this road to figure out what it is exactly that causes this behavior to not only happen, but to be acceptable.  Boiled down to the most simple observations, there seems to be a pattern.  Somewhere along the road, Americans have culturally conditioned themselves to exist within this sense of entitlement, in which we all seem to believe that we can do no wrong as long as someone else is there to clean up our messes.  Unfortunately as Americans we "all" believe that there is someone else to do things for us, so nothing is actually getting done.   And buying things for the sake of buying things is not only ridiculously wasteful, it is also harmful to the political and economical state that we find ourselves in.

It may be too late for Miami, but we can learn from this.  We should figure out how to behave better as a society and to stop shooting ourselves in the damn foot.  We cannot spend and consume without understanding the consequences.  We ought to be paying better attention to ourselves and our own habits, and stop expecting others to both spoon feed us our culture and to fix our problems at the same time.

Jack Johnson says it best: 
Oh but everybody thinks
That everybody knows
About everybody else
Nobody knows
Anything about themselves
Cause their all worried about everybody else