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But something has gone sour. The American people are beginning to see that maybe we are not fighting for peace in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe we were not fighting for peace in Somalia, maybe we were not fighting for peace anywhere in Asia or Africa. Wasn't this Pax Americana costing them too dearly at home? Weren't they all paying for this war that their sons and daughters were being killed for? Weren't the Big Corporations making huge profits while they suffered foreclosures of their homes?
Was there ever going to be an end to this horrid war? No, say the masters of war, there will be a war without end. Finally a word of truth. And the people began to see that they'd been had. The madmen at the helm of their own country and a huge part of the rest of the world were the only winners. They were the kings for a day in this world without compassion, without a vision for the future, without a plan for how to make their gambling craze be compatible with the survival of the planet. The gambling became a goal in itself and the short-time winning spree made the madmen dizzier than ever and things got a bit out of hand.
There was one value in this setup and its name was money. Paper money, useless money, huge fortunes that only increased the poverty at home and in the third world, but, or so said the 'wise men', they themselves were going to be immune to any wild fluctuations on Wall Street. Let the poor people lose their homes, they themselves would sit comfortably in their mansions. Let the hurricanes blow, they were always going to be protected by the high walls surrounding them. Family values be damned. The word had been useful as a political slogan but they didn't need slogans any more. The people were made powerless. They were totally malleable to the whims of the masters of war. The word 'values' had completely lost its true meaning. The slogans of Patriotism, Terrorism and Eternal War were on the agenda of the day.
The end of winner take all
And then the bottom fell out. The U.S economy was in shambles and the crisis spread to the rest of the world. Can this meltdown of the world economy possibly lead to a rethinking in the minds of the ruling 'elite', the bankers and Wall Street conmen who are now scrambling to put a lid on the violently boiling stew? If compassion does not work for the psychopaths who rule the world, can reality tell them that something went terribly wrong? Their monolithic machine hit a massive wall.
Will this be the final proof that raw capitalism does not work? Will the Big Money men finally understand that there has to be production behind capital gains, not just speculation for short-term gains? And who are the producers? You and me. The producers were the people who are now laid off and hurting, who lost their homes through the urge to get themselves deeper and deeper in debt, a way of life that was preached to them by the bankers. Preached to them by the Wall Street prophets who have not lost their fortunes or their standing. Only the workers are hurting. This government takes care of its own.
When will the people finally be able to convince Big Money that their wealth is due to the ceaseless efforts of the workers? That they must have a share in the profits or else the economy is bound to tank. Again and again. No buyers, no profits. The Big guys can sit safe on their big estates only for so long before they too begin to hurt. You don't eat shares and derivatives. You don't go on luxury cruises when there is noone to make up the crew.
Even the people who don't understand the words compassion and sharing will find one day that speculative short-term gains do not make the world go round.
Being your brother's keeper
How about reinstating an equitable way of running the ship? When will the leaders of the world see that with the billions of the world's population who are starving or on the edge of starvation, the lack of equilibrium on the planet is not going to be solved by letting those billions starve to death.
The people who fail to understand that we are all born equals and that the only humane thing to do is to be your brother's keeper have to do some serious thinking. If your brother is starving it's not because he is lazy, it's because he was never given a chance to earn a decent living, or else you the criminals who rule the planet took it away from him. Given equal chances to make a decent living to begin with, the human being is instinctively a hard worker. If you ruined his chances to look out for himself it's your responsibility to restore his rights to a decent life.
Call it socialism, call it welfare if you like, but I call it the repairing the damage caused by colonialism, expansionism and corporatism and the effects of a game of loaded dice that you invented. You naïvely believed that you could do without the honest people who were not brought up to become rapists and predators. You thought those people could be exploited indefinitely until they conveniently died from starvation and overwork. In the meantime you had reaped all the profit possible from their delivering diamonds and gold from the mines in the Congo or in the badly constructed and secured mines in your own country where several deadly accidents have occurred in the past few years alone. Who cares? There are millions of unemployed workers who are waiting to take their dangerous jobs. That's the way you planned your game of Big Profit.
How unfortunate for you to realize finally that your wealth is not going to go on multiplying endlessly, with just a tolerable number of victims of your greed every year. How unfortunate for you to realize that you have to be your brother's keeper or else the economy will come to a screeching halt.
Was democracy a dream only?
If it's unrealistic to think that we might be able to change the minds of the madly accumulating psychopaths, today's world leaders, or to put them in straitjackets, we can at least hope for a future world where humility, cooperation and concern for the Other will reign, instead of fear.
When will we all have a voice in where the world is going? When will we get some semblance of democracy back?
