Values
This
is a good time to reexamine the
values Americans wish to present
to the rest of the world, a good
time for the type of serious
introspection necessary to compel
the transcendence of culture that
our society desperately needs,
and a good time to look deeply
into our hearts, to determine,
honestly,whether or not we, as
the world's preeminent
civilization, are on the right
path.
We
must stop spending so much time
worshipping money, and start
spending more time worshipping
each other. Our hyper-adrenalized
mad scramble for the brass ring
of trash-culture consumerism
leaves far too many trampled
underfoot, either unable, or
unwilling, to compete in a
culture of false gods. It's
dehumanizing, and most of us miss
the brass ring anyway, leaving
us, in the end, bereft of both
dignity and wealth. So what's the
point? We're worn out and broken
down by the long dash, and the
universe laughs at us for loosing
the wrong race. What's say we
adopt values that reflect a
culture more in tune with the
"better angels of our
nature".
It
is a tenet of the Founding
Fathers that all we really have
is each other, so they
constructed a government and
society based around the
individual, in the hopes that the
common man, and not big
interests, would control that
government and shape that
society. It was, and remains, a
valiant and revolutionary effort
to preempt the ego and greed of
elites who would stop at nothing
in a ruthless quest for more and
more power. Government by, for,
and of the people was the great
equalizer, a conscious attempt to
avoid, at all costs, the
stigmatizing class system
prevalent throughout societies of
the world. But, at the new
Millennium, what do we have? Big
Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Energy, Big
Timber, Big Money, small ideals,
smaller hopes, and dreams that
sacrifice basic humanity on the
alter of False Promise. Robber
Barrons are charting our destiny,
and that's no way to live. If
there's one lesson we took away
from Sept, 11, 2001, it's that
wealth won't protect you when
Fate is the hunter. There's
nothing intrinsic there, nothing
your soul can hang its hat on, a
house of cards that collapses at
the slightest wind, as evidenced
by the demise of giant energy
vulture Enron Corp. It's based on
a set of values that earns us the
scorn and contempt of much of the
rest of the world, and it's not
even real. Money never is. But
people are. It is,
metaphysically, our one true
wealth and resource. The great
empires of human arrogance
(including Capitalism) come and
go with time. But our humanity
remains unbroken throughout, a
beacon to our clumsy attempts to
embrace it, ending, time and
again, floundering on the rocks
of mortal hubris.
Can
we reverse this? Well, if you
can't put down your cell phone,
the answer is probably
"no". The
inconsequential and superfluous
will continue to take on added
gravity and prestige, until our
culture, corrupted, shallow, and
disunited, follows the Roman
Empire into history. Or, we can
take this unique opportunity for
reflection to rediscover how much
we really need each other, and
just how fulfilling and joyful
that need can be.
Sept.
11 reminds us that the external
world is fragile, fleeting,
violent and dispassionate.
Politically, we're still in the
cave, where the stronger man is
right, and shiny trinkets
establish "worth".
That's ugly. But the internal
world of the mind allows us the
luxury of humility, respect, and
compassion, transcending the pain
of human weakness, releasing our
hearts to tend to the only
lasting entity in the
universe....our souls. And that
doesn't take money. It takes only
the realization of human purpose
in the cold cosmos. And that
would put us on the right path to
win the right race.
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