Almitra

AMERICA'S FINITE FUTURE?

By Arianna Huffington

Near the beginning of "Saturday Night Fever," John Travolta's
Tony Manero, frustrated that his boss thinks he should save his
salary instead of spending it on a new disco shirt, cries out,
"F- - - the future!" To which his boss replies: "No, Tony, you
can't f- - - the future. The future f- - -s you! It catches up
with you and it f- - -s you if you ain't prepared for it!"

Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but America has morphed into
a nation of Tony Maneros - collectively dismissing the future. And
nowhere is this mindset more prevalent than at the Bush White House, which is unwavering in its determination to ignore the future.

The evidence is overwhelming. Everywhere you look, it's IOUs passed
on to future generations. Record federal debt. Record foreign debt.
Record budget deficits. Record trade deficits.

And this attempt to f- - - the future is not limited to economics.
You see the same attitude when it comes to energy policy, health
care, education, Social Security and especially the environment
- with the Bushies redoubling their efforts to make the world
uninhabitable as fast as possible. (See their attempts to gut
the Clean Air Act, gut the Clean Water Act, gut the Endangered
Species Act, gut regulations limiting pollution from power plants.)

And the even bigger problem? They don't see this as a problem.
In fact, it actually all may be an essential part of the plan.

If this last sentence doesn't make a wit of sense to you, then you
are clearly not one of the 50 million Americans who believe in some
form of End-Time philosophy, an extreme evangelical theology that
embraces the idea that we are fast approaching the end of the world,
at which point Jesus will return and carry all true believers - living
and dead - up to heaven ("the Rapture"), leaving all nonbelievers on
earth to face hellfire and damnation ("the Tribulation"). Christ and
his followers will then return to a divinely refurbished earth for
a thousand-year reign of peace and love.

In other words, why worry about minor little details like clean air,
clean water, safe ports and the safety net when Jesus is going to give
the world an "Extreme Makeover: Planet Edition" right after he finishes
putting Satan in his place once and for all?

Keep in mind: This nutty notion is not a fringe belief being espoused by
some street corner Jeremiah wearing a "The End Is Nigh!" sandwich board.
End-Timers have repeatedly made the "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic
books among America's best-selling titles, with over 60 million copies sold.

And they have also spawned a mini-industry of imminent doomsday Web sites like www.ApocalypseSoon.org and www.RaptureReady.com Raptureready.com. The latter
features a Rapture Index that, according to the site, acts as a "Dow Jones
Industrial Average of end time activity" and a "prophetic speedometer" (the
higher the number, the faster we're moving toward the Second Coming). For
those of you keeping score, the Rapture Index is currently 152 - an
off-the-chart mark of prophetic indicators.

Now I'm not saying that Bush is a delusion-driven
End-Timer (although he has let it be known that God speaks to - and through-
him, and he believes "in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans").
But he and his crew are certainly acting as if that's the case.

Take the jaw-dropping federal debt, which currently stands at $4.3
trillion. Just last month the Government Accountability Office released
a report that found that Bush's economic policies "will result in massive
fiscal pressures that, if not effectively addressed, could cripple the
economy, threaten our national security, and adversely affect the quality
of life of Americans in the future."

And what was the administration's reaction to this frightening assessment?
Vice President Cheney shrugged, took a hearty swig of the End-Time Kool-Aid,
and announced that the administration wants another round of tax cuts.
Basically a big f- - - you.

Then there's our trade deficit, which ballooned to a record $165 billion
in the third quarter of 2004, when imports exceeded exports by 54 percent.
Thanks to this imbalance, America is racking up a staggering $665 billion
in additional foreign debt every year - that's $5,500 for every U.S.
household - and placing our future economic security in the hands of others.
Here is Bush's response to this daunting prospect: "People can buy more
United States products if they're worried about the trade deficit."
Sounds like he's really got it under control.

I guess after the Rapture, debts of all kinds will be forgiven. The
White House is promoting a similar "What Me Worry?" attitude with our
live-for-the-moment energy policy. America currently spends $13 million
per hour on foreign oil - a number that will only increase as U.S. oil
production peaks within the next five years just as consumption by
industrializing nations doubles over the next 25 years.

So is the president pushing for a long-overdue increase in mileage standards
or launching an all-out effort to break our dependence on foreign oil? Hardly.
Instead, he's getting ready to make his umpteenth attempt to open the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

And that is just a small part of the president's full-bore assault on the
environment, best summed up by Sen. Jim Jeffords, the ranking minority
member on the Environment and Public Works Committee: "I expect the
Bush Administration will go down in history as the greatest disaster
for public health and the environment in the history of the United States."

That said, it's not hard to see why Bush has hopped aboard the Apocalypse
Express. Acting like there's no tomorrow dovetails just as neatly with
his corporate backers' rapacious desires as it does with his evangelical
backers' rapturous desires. It offers him a political twofer: placating
his corporate donors while winning the hearts and votes of the true
believers who helped the president achieve a Second Coming of his own.
No small miracle, given his record.

It's important to point out, however, that it's not just the White House
and the End-Timers. Acting as if we have a finite future has infected our
entire culture. Just look at personal savings, which have fallen to next
to nothing, with Americans socking away a meager two-tenths of 1 percent
of their disposable incomes. Meanwhile, the average U.S. household carries
about $14,000 of credit-card debt; one in four consumers spends more than
he or she can afford; and, as a result, every 15 seconds, someone somewhere
in America is going bankrupt. Which, I guess, in Bush World is how an angel
gets his wings.

All this represents a seismic shift in our cultural outlook. Since our
founding, the American ethos has been forward-looking, geared to a bountiful
future, with each generation of parents working as hard as they can to
ensure a better life for their children. Those days are clearly gone.

And it has put our entire civilization at grave risk - a point echoed
with great clarity by Jared Diamond, whose new book, "Collapse," looks
at the reasons why so many great civilizations of the past have failed.

Although Diamond offers a range of reasons why these societies collapsed,
one message comes through loud and clear: We've got to stop living like
there is no tomorrow - or "f- - - the future" will become a self-fulfilling
prophecy.

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