I'M FINDING THAT IT IS BECOMING TEDIOUS

The constant drone of the economic crises and the way it is being discussed/framed by the "talking head experts" which then leads to how it is being talked about in public has reached at least for me a fingernails-on-chalkboard level.

The wealth that had been created in the market and through inflated home prices and the value attached to other things wasn't all real. And so came the day the illusion began to fall and the illusory wealth just evaporated. I had a client today that just couldn't understand that some rich fat cat wasn't sitting around counting the money that had disappeared from her portfolio and now was in his. It's gone....it evaporated.

And I'm sure it is obvious that I am not an economist but I do know enough to be able to say that the economists don't fully understand it all either and certainly never tell the public the actual truth....if they did the economy would fail. The illusion must be maintained for it to work....that is, work beyond the simple buying and selling that has happened between individuals for a long long time in order to survive. That exchange has to happen unless we as individuals become self sufficient in the things we and our families need to live.

But modern day economies in the industrialized world have expanded well beyond survival and we in the West are way out ahead in that expansion. We have lost touch with reality and when it comes to how much of the rest of the world lives...out of touch with reality doesn't do justice to what has actually happened to us who live in the land of plenty. This system has taught us to believe there are really no limits when it seems to me reality is that this is unsustainable and has always been so. And we all suffer because of this lie. Even the rich fat cats. He/she who dies with the most toys does not win.

I've posted his words here many times before and they bounce around in mind often in this climate we all find ourselves in. Even so, it's been beneficial for me to keep reminding myself by thinking about things that have been spoken in regards to these things of the world system. The sermon on the mount is a straight forward damning critique of our economy that is all about continued growth....which is another way of saying: GET MORE or move out of the way.

"We have many commodities but little satisfaction, little sense of the sufficiency of anything. The scarcity of satisfaction makes of our many commodities an infinite series of commodities, the new commodities invariably promising greater satisfaction than the older ones. In fact, the industrial economy's most marketed commodity is satisfaction, and this commodity, which is repeatedly promised, bought, and paid for, is never delivered." Wendell Berry

"If the Golden Rule were generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week. We have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy. The economy is no god for me, for I have had too close a look at its wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap. It has ridden questionable triumphs over the bodies of small farmers and tradesmen and craftsmen. I see it, still, driving my neighbors off their farms into the factories. I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can give themselves a value. Its principle is to waste and destroy the living substance of the world and the birthright of posterity for a monetary profit that is the most flimsy and useless of human artifacts."

And finally, I have become convinced we have lost this very thing partially due to the effect our economic system has on us all. The ability to live with and love our neighbors in the same way that we long for them to live with and love us.

“We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other's arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life,
Who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments”