Where the nation is now: looking into the funhouse mirror
In America today, we are living in an age of extreme excess and imbalance. Most do not see it, of course. We cannot see it, because nearly everyone has “drunk the well water” and regards it as normal. Even those of us who do consider this excess warped or perverse may still feel a certain amount of it to be unavoidable or inevitable: “Go along to get along,” in so many words.
But this excess and imbalance is not simply a matter of the country’s unbridled consumerism. Fueling our excessive purchases and collective philosophy of “living large” — otherwise known as “the American way of life” and famously termed “not negotiable” by President George Bush Sr. — is the other side of the coin of modern excess: working slavishly hard and feeling we need to keep busy all the time. For without these twin talismans of ambition, we could not pay for nor would we feel compelled to indulge in the overbusy, overconsumeristic lifestyle so many of us believe we should have.
Even with them, we still cannot afford some of our unrestrained purchases, and so with the addition of debt-fueled spending we can add “overextended” to the description of our outsize appetites. Below is a representative roundup of the most typical items in the nation’s lifestyle that keep us indebted to what we could call the four “O”s of overwork, overconsumption, overbusyness, and overextendedness.
