Use It or Lose It

The other day I discovered that I could no longer whistle.  I never could whistle really loud like some people can do by putting two fingers in their mouth, but I used to be able to whistle a tune, and now I can't.  The more I thought about it, I couldn't remember the last time I whistled, so I don't know if I lost that ability gradually or all at once.  I also don't know why I haven't whistled in such a long time, I guess I just never felt like it.  After trying for long enough to make my lips sore, I was able to get one or two soft notes, but mostly all I got was air.  

Remember, I qualified my statement about the Freedom Dividend by saying, "As long as our economy is being driven by consumption instead of production."  The US economy was driven by production up to and beyond World War II.  Indeed, without our productivity, the war might not have been won, and the post war recovery might never have happened.  When Europe was flat on its ass after the war, the Marshall Plan provided it with the cash to rebuild, and most of that cash came right back to the US because we were the only industrial nation that had any production capacity left.  Sometime after that, they began shipping our production overseas and turning us into a nation of consumers.  I don't know if this was done deliberately for some nefarious purpose, or if it was just a matter of short sightedness or negligence but, one way or another, our production economy was lost, or thrown away.

I clicked on Old Dog's link about the behavioral sink.  It appears that there is more to this overcrowding thing than meets the eye.  I am willing to concede that merely minnimizing  global population growth may not solve all our problems, especially since birth control is not being used by the people who need it most.  Indeed, I may be biased because I never did like city living or being in large crowds anyway.  Like Daniel Boone, I crave elbow room.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Labor Day used to be on May 1 which, coincidently, is also a be a big commie holiday.  Actually, the celebration of May Day predates communism by a few thousand years, but the commies took it over.  So it came to pass that Labor Day was moved to the first Monday in September to distance it from the people who had given May Day a bad name.  The correct name for the Fourth of July is "Independence Day", being the day that the Declaration of Independence was signed, but it is commonly called the Fourth of July.  I seem to remember that, there was once some kind of commie plot to change the name of Christmas to "Xmas" but, thankfully, it never caught on.