Posted by Volker on May 06, 2003 at 03:04:45:
In Reply to: Our business posted by Needs to be said on May 05, 2003 at 14:27:15:
From my point of view, the general mistake is to reduce this topic just to financial situations. The point is much deeper: Every society is eventually getting what it deserves. My wife is Russian, so I am able to get some more internal synopsis in regard to the Eastern culture. They have a flourishing music arts landscape that we can only dream of - at a widely spread quality level we can only dream of, partly on old instruments - generally with few to no money. They still widely appreciate actively (by studying an instrument) and passively (by visiting classic concerts) music arts, because their life is (not yet) completely commercialized. Kids are guided to culture from the beginning (rather than to 150 TV channels and computer games 12 hours a day). Here you still have an eldorado of books and reading, whereas in the West, the importance of book lecture is constantly decreasing in favor to TV fast food (coinciding with a shocking percentage of analphabets). The same is with music fast food: just consuming what the commercial music industry is spraying on a youngster from the initial years up to adolescence. If somebody only knows hamburgers in the first 2 decades of life, how can he/she enjoy a French gourmet dinner later?
Yes, money can help on a short term base to fill a gap. But there are many other non-productive issues governments provide giantic public loans for, and they listen to peoples' voices, 'cause they want to get re-elected. Every society system has it's light and shadow, the only question is, to what direction the shadow are thrown.
So again: Societies are getting what they deserve after all.
I am just a foreign guest on this board, and I hope I made nobody upset, but I also hope and think, such board can tolerate a bunch of different opinion colors.