The Next 10 Years

I think the primary way in which the United States will change in the next 10 years is that we will see the final attempt to obliterate the socially mobile middle class and the reinstatement of a rigid 2 caste system where a very small percentage of the populace contains not the overwhelming majority of the material and financial resources, but are the only ones with access to what the post- WW II generations saw as rights for every American: education, health care, a living wage and the possibility of a better life for subsequent generations based on merit. Instead, sociologists will witness a forced transformation, through purchased policy as a result if the Citizens United Supreme Court decision- towards making a third world America outside of gated communities that is increasingly uneducated in even the most basic skills, malnourished, diseased, destitute and probably subjected to increasingly abusive and oppressive state policies by the by the upper class. If this change succeeds, this bleak vision will come to pass in at most a generation. In fact, that next generation of sociologists will probably be either native to other countries or if they are American by birth, they'll be of the very selective and elitist upper class. It's entirely probable that their theories of human behavior will be so subjectively skewed by aristocratic morality-that their theories will resemble 18th century social philosophers rather then 21st century scientists. We are witnessing the key events that will attempt to complete this social regression in this country-the destruction of the collective bargaining power of unions, the obliteration of public education and the inexorable bankruptcy of America by a needlessly bloated war budget. Again, the next 10 years will see a class war begin to play itself out in both the political arena and the economic dynamics.

Can this bleak future be averted? It can, but right now the circumstances do not favor such an outcome as our legal and political institutions have gradually been subverted towards those purposes. Our politicians seem more and more beholden to their financial supporters then the people they are supposed to represent. Any kind of organized resistance-especially if the antiunion movement succeeds-will have to be done in a grass-roots manner. This will especially be true if along with the socioeconomic shift comes a resulting shift from a democratic to an autocratic form of government. I believe the precedent of the primary tool of that grass roots movement capability has already manifested itself in the Middle East in the form of the protests in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere-that tool was the internet. Most protests were organized and networked for information dispersal through Facebook, Twitter and other internet methods. The internet not only allowed for dispersal of information in real time, it was very difficult for even the most oppressive regimes to terminate without shutting down

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