Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Madness or ... ?

The teaser under a headline on the NYT news summary on my Google page said the other day:

The next administration will need to shape policy for a nation that will be less accustomed to easy credit and overspending.
There is a painful truth in that. Many of us (and count me in that group) are used to easy credit and the ability to far outspend what we make. It became almost an entitlement to the point that people who should not have been able to get mortgages could, for just one example. The effects of that have been the source of headlines for weeks now.

But I don't think that will do much. Underneath it all is what could be considered a fatal flaw that will be hard to break. That comment about overspending hints at the problem. We have become- and maybe always have been- an economy that is based on continuous consumption. More has to be sold this year than last. Profits must be higher this quarter than the same quarter a year ago. We must keep buying and buying or the economy will collapse.

Then I read Mike Todd's challenging post at Waving or Drowning. He called it A Fork Cross in the Road. He meditates upon this whole economic issue and ties it to the church. He starts with the quote from Bono about the situation.
"It is extraordinary to me that you can find $700 billion to save Wall Street and the entire G8 can't find $25 billion to save 25,000 children who die every day of preventable treatable disease and hunger. That's mad, that is mad."
He comments that most of the time when faced with the problems of poverty or assistance to others we cry "No money? He continues:
However, when our greed, self-centeredness and old-fashioned stupidity threaten to put a curb on our own ability to buy more stuff, then we can find the money. Billions of dollars. Hundreds of billions, in fact. We have created this monster, and we will go to any lengths to keep it alive, damn it.

There's a term that has been bouncing around my head for the last week or so. At the same press briefing Bono put voice to the term. Here's what he said:

"This is moral bankruptcy."

I find it fascinating that it took the near financial bankruptcy of the United States to provide concrete proof of our moral bankruptcy.
As I read that I realized that both sides in the current disaster are just two different sides of the same idea- that we deserve to get rich or to be able to buy as much as we want. That of course is the extreme, but most of us, myself included, live on that very fundamental "ideal." It is all about "us." Never "them"- the lonely, the lost, the least.

No president - and certainly no presidential candidate- will get anywhere near challenging that. It pays the bills, it pays his salary. Most of us wouldn't want to hear it- or more to the point- do much about it. I sit here with my HD TV, writing on my laptop with my iPod nearby. Mea culpa.

The church and religious people of other faiths can be at the grass roots leadership. But there is nonational leadership or national leader to help change this. I don't know how many of us would follow such a challenge. But someone has to do it and this is a great time to start.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Bravo for a wonderfully apt commentary! The current debate has been packaged--framed is the polite word--to exclude alternative economic conceptions.
Perhaps only Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Dennis Kucinich in the House have articulated real alternatives that might be said to have a measure of economic justice in them.