Rock on, Jack Baruth.
I agree with every word of this, but the saddest, but most prescient point in the whole thing was when you said,
"Some of you won’t care, of course. You’ll cheerfully buy sweatshop-made automobiles with fancy labels, just like you’re doing with your polyester athleisure now, secure in the arrogant belief that you and your job are too special, too difficult, too unique to ever be sent out of the country the way ninety-nine percent of denim production has been over the past thirty years."
Generally, the people espousing this idea of their own intellectual exceptionalism are the people who should be the most afraid of it. Most of the citizens of this nation are of exceedingly average intelligence, never really taught to think for themselves (as should have been made clear by the events of the past 22 months). Inquisitive, flexible minds trained to do practical things are in ever shorter supply, especially in the megapolises people are currently inclined to inhabit.
I think it was Tolstoy who said that the worst insult you can give a man is to tell him he's average (or something to that effect). To roughly paraphrase the kid from "The Incredibles", "everybody's special, which is another way of saying nobody is". This is the state where we presently find most of the upper middle class of this country.
It's worth sounding the alarm over. Our standard of living is made possible only by the availability of underpriced goods made in east Asia, and by China continuing to fund our capability to trade by buying our national debt. Nearly every push toward a greener/better/safer/more sustainable future pushes us further towards more disposable, more manufacturing intensive, more shipping dependent dystopia.
I work in one of the last industries (HVAC/R service with an emphasis on supermarket refrigeration) still dominated by domestic companies. But even here, forces beyond those of a normal market are driving us towards cheaper, more disposable, less repairable "solutions" to "problems" none of us ever knew we had. There's a disposable east Asian future down in the boiler room. NYC recently pretty much mandated disposable Chinese VRF "mini-splits", with their "no new gas-fired heating equipment" policy. It matters not to the powers to be that the United States sits on an ocean of natural gas, or that that modern gas-fired heating equipment is efficient in the high 90s percentile, or that gas-fired equipment is (mostly) manufactured here - all future heating equipment will be electric (so that we can generate power with NG under the best circumstances, and more likely with coal), which drives the industry towards and east Asian homogony.
If we were trying to destroy ourselves, we couldn't do a better job of it.
