Society has been complacent for a good 30 years now where have you been? American society first starting becoming complacent in the early seventies it is just that the country was in denial and was caught off guard when children that grew up in the seventies were slackers and lacked motivation and tried to rebel against the values of their parents. Complacency is the elephant in the room, yet what are we going to do about it? There are many reasons for the complacency; back then I was a child yet to look back on it I think the complacency of the seventies was more of a general burnout of the intensity that followed the decades before it, of which the sixties represented a boiling point for the county.

These days complacency seems to be a tool against the masses; the rampant consumerism of the eighties created an environment where image was more important than substance, materialism more important than productivity. We now live in a society in which all of the hard work, the dirty work we used to pride ourselves on, is being done by the immigrants who come into this country and through the outsourcing of jobs to Asia. America doesn't really produce anything anymore it is all politics, design, marketing, and information technology these days. Even in our Universities, we aren't teaching each other; how many of your computer technology professors were from India or Pakistan, for example.

The times have changed, and while we obviously cannot go back to that hard working ethos represented by advertisements encouraging young housewife's to support the Second World War, in which a rough brunette is outfitted in a work shirt flexing we have to find motivation in other ways. It isn't likely that life will change anytime soon, so we need to adapt to the reality of what is going on and stop complaining about welfare, immigration, social services, outsourcing, and everything else that people like to point to as reasons for the complacency in this country. One thing that hasn't changed is that if you aren't willing to hustle and work 12 hour days or more you aren't going to get anywhere, that is a simple fact. Stop asking about making more money or lower prices of goods and services when the guy next to you is more than willing to pay for them, and has better means to do so than you are. Don't expect to find affordable housing until it is in the best interests of the city and developers to create it for you, and stop trying to get something for nothing when you are well aware of what the market forces are dictating. Sure there is complacency, but we bring it upon ourselves ...

Learn more about this author, Christopher Kendalls.
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