CAN WE GET BACK TO WHAT'S IMPORTANT?

I've had many conversations with others over the past year or so about how our society is constantly pulling people away from the things that are most important. This has especially been the case the past week with the fear many are feeling due to the impending economic crisis.

As I alluded to in my last post, when we get caught up defending things (big ideas... ideologies) we often find ourselves in stand offs with other people. Often the difficulties are created by simply misunderstanding one another but too often in those misunderstandings suspicions take over and turns into wild assumptions. The outcome...Trust of others is hard to find these days. Which brings me to one of the most foundational things we humans need. Each other. It's what we were created for....to relate to one another.....with love.

We might end up being put into a situation where we are forced to learn how to do it. I hope love wins out over ideologies. It's the revolution I am going to live for. Hopefully in those moments I veer out of that space I'll catch myself sooner than later so as to minimize any damage I might cause to the others standing around.

The past few days has got me to thinking about Wendell Berry and a couple of his books I have read over the past few years. I googled the title of the last book of his I had read Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community and ran across this from the essay "Discipline and Hope":

"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."