I was planning to post today on some trends affecting our digital nation, but with this morning’s news of the sale (bailout) of Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers’ Chapter 11 filing, and now the situation with AIG---all on the heels of Fannie & Freddie & the mortgage crisis/banking mess, inflation & the aftermath of voracious oil speculation, I feel compelled to take a moment to behold the landscape. ---So is this the feeling of the financial world as-we-know-it cracking and crumbling around us?Actually, I think not. It will take much longer to bring the juggernaut that is the America mega-economy & social system to its knees---but the fault lines are there. Pope Benedict XVI last week in Paris said that the root of our problems is a “pagan” addiction to power and money that has become modern society’s “plague.” Unless the Pope used pagan to mean anything put above God/Spiritual, as opposed to the word’s more common association with cultures not Judeo-Christian, I’m unconvinced how pagan or how modern this is.
Yet the Pope asks: “Have not money, the thirst for possessions, for power and even knowledge, diverted man from his true destiny?” In light of today’s news, I have to concede that’s a good question. He is, of course, not the only major religious leader that’s asking this these days; similar statements can be heard from Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Fundamentalist and Mainline Christian, Shinto, Shaman, Neopagan leaders, and many more.
I think what we’re witnessing today are outward signs of the inward problem that we’ve disassociated from that original spirit—what America’s Founding Fathers tapped into, followed, and set this country’s systems and structures upon. A belief in goodness of humanity, trust of neighbor, responsibility for oneself and one's actions, doing the right thing for no other reason than because it’s the right thing. I am not talking about The American Spirit. There’s nothing “American” about it. It’s a human spirit. And when it all devolves into “Grab what I can get out of this system for me and my own”---that’s scary days ahead.
I don’t have any grand answers to this disassociation. Just simple a feeling: that now is the time to do exactly what logical tells us not do. Now is the time to trust when we have no reason to trust. To keep doing the right thing when everybody seems to be doing the wrong thing. To love those that don't deserve it and have faith in those who show little promise. To not let our standards slip and to guide those for whom we are responsible to do the same. To believe that it will all be ok and work as if it is ok. Because that energy, that faith, that trust and goodness is what holds back the Tide. Be it and it will grow. Leave it and it will die. It starts and ends with ourselves.
So thanks for indulging me here. And I know, I know---there are those that today will just shrug their shoulders, grab their Diet Coke, and go back to watching Gossip Girl. Ahhh. I sincerely love humanity. Especially when it’s a good time to haul out your Julian of Norwich.
References: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26677884
Posts
