The End Is Near

About ten years ago, one of the daily newspapers was about to go out of business, but survived another ten to realize that conditions weren't getting better, but probably getting worse for all but the strongest and most competitive -- in the world.

In the Internet age, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is not just competing against The Advertiser -- but every newspaper in the world, and beyond that, every publication in the world, and every book ever written. It is no longer a monopoly source of information -- and while the same can be said of the schools and universities, they usually don't have the luxury of being government institutions dedicated to providing tenures and sinecures in addition to public employee unions doing propaganda for them relentlessly -- especially in Hawaii, where the only game in town is government funded work.

Thus their representatives pride themselves on obtaining "more than their fair share" of government grants, earmarks and pork barrel, as their mark of accomplishment -- which is fine as far as the money goes -- but it is not parlayed into developing useful skills and products that would be validated in the private markets. People just learn to be government employees -- and private enterprises become gutted if they are successful enough to become big -- if the unions don't get to them first.

So the dynamics are not hopeful -- but the people remain hopeful that the real estate speculations will kick up once again and they will be able to cash out/in this time, rather than hang on through another prolonged cycle of diminishing hope. And so the newspapers proclaim hopefully from time to time, that a median price for a house of a million dollars is imminent in ten years, without considering the income required to support such prices.

The economy and society now runs on "wishful-thinking," that sometime in the future, things will become perfect again, just as they remember as a kid, when they had no such worries.

Meanwhile, many are suspecting that those who can, take the first opportunity to leave the Islands while they are still viable and not entrapped -- usually by their illusions of paradise, that are not borne out in their daily lives of now endless anxieties and preoccupation with a future with no prospects.

The difference this time, is that being on an island in the middle of the vast Pacific, is no longer isolation from what is happening everywhere else in the world -- from earthquakes to recessions, and the shift from 20th century mass (media) culture, society and economy, to 21st century individualized realities, for which the general and generalization, is not worth knowing -- which is all the mass media mind "knows."

And that is not reality -- but just what they want everybody to think -- that the mass perception is the real, and individual and actual, is false, when in truth, the only reality, is the individual -- which is the whole of each individual's actual experience and life. Thus we move closer to actual experience and end the speculations of what we think it ought to be -- or was.