Watching video of birds draped in heavy sheets of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is an agony anticipated. Their lifeforce will succumb to suffocation. As will many of ours here in America. The steady onslaught of human violation against itself and all other forms of life is capturing our attention away from everything else. Electronic escapes are powerless here.
Even those of us still in possession of career, home and retirement funds sense an aridity. No matter what we do, or at what frenzied pace, life is slipping from our grasp. Last Sunday’s sermon is no more than an echo in a deep canyon: what went out comes back, unenlightening. Our panorama is pock-marked with unfortunate neighbors and abandoned structures. Charity without myopia has become an overwhelming concept. To hermit or not to hermit should you have the means is not even an option anymore: the dread is part of your shadow. We see disruption, hear outburst, feel friction, taste what’s soured and smell foul rising. And weather once guaranteed by earth’s rhythms, well, we’ve pretty much got the skinny on that now.
Alot of us in this country are being blamed for our financial catastrophe. We spent money we didn’t have and overfed an economy that was ultimately unsustainable because the guy fitting the fender on the SUV was as dependent on our credit as we were. When the powers that be announced that all that was about to collapse, away went the career, home and retirement funds along with the guy, fender and SUV. As the unemployment compensation waned, we listened to experts scold our inability to recover the nation’s economy that so desperately needed our …..spending. We were Catch-22 incarnate.
But a job lost and an underwater mortgage abandoned does not a 12 trillion dollar derivatives market make. And yet it happened, artistically and aggressively created by people who intrinsically knew how to cut in line. Where those gilded gents dock their yachts in this unstable clime is unknown and doesn’t really matter. Hoarding has become anachronistic. What rules instead, is that dread
. Now that everything is out of balance (and does Mother Nature, let alone physics, hate that) much will be sacrificed. You, me, Spring’s regeneration in the marshes, the general health and well-being of an entire nation. Political discourse is already showing its lesions. There’s no policy to proffer because nothing will work and those in power know it. Voters who clamor to pull their Democrat and replace the seat with their Republican also know it. The very factions that make up government on all levels in this country are witless. We have nowhere to turn for guidance, and frankly, after the raid on our treasures by Wall Street and corporations like BP, lack the means to inspire ourselves. We’re going to be blamed for that, too.
Downtrodden, dispossessed, close to disemboweled, the people so long known as the “backbone of America” will disappear. Like those birds. No one as yet knows who will be the next source of cornucopia that feeds the greed this new America seems to need, but it sure as hell won’t be the raiders themselves.
That’s the definition of a derivative.