I watch the news from America and it is grim. Mostly all they talk about is the deepening economic implosion: plunging stock prices, rising unemployment, foreclosures. It seems there was never a better time to be a kibbutznik.
I don’t have to worry about my portfolio being suddenly worthless. I never met Bernie Madoff. The kibbutz owns my house so I have no mortgage. Of course, I also have no money, so no matter how bad it gets I’m unlikely to be worse off. I find that actually somehow comforting.
What puzzles me is why anyone thought the American economy was so great before this, better than it was, say, forty or fifty years ago. I grew up in a middle class family. My father worked, my mother stayed home and kept house. On one income we had a house, a new car every three years, all the food we could eat and enough gadgets to keep everybody entertained. This is the way it was with everyone I knew. All this changed sometime in the 70’s. Suddenly it took two incomes to keep a family afloat. Few of my generation are living better than our parents did and I think it’s likely that the future one won’t live as well as we are. This is profoundly sad.
Not so on the kibbutz. Fifty years ago people lived in asbestos-roofed shacks. Things are infinitely better now. Socialism may well have failed everywhere it was tried, but capitalists have no cause to gloat at the moment. True, I still have no money, but in this socialist society I don’t deserve any.
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