The night has just enough space in it for some old-fashioned blogging. Before I scurry off to a laborless sleep, awaiting the frozen morning that I know can’t help but be out there…
My supervisor posed an interesting thought today, because she said she understood a certain amount of greed, to want nice things, but she said she didn’t understand what happens when that goes to the lengths of dozens of cars and small islands… what she spoke of as being excessive. She doesn’t understand how the little greed could become any greater. I told her it’s a lot less about greed as it is about insatiable desire - to be filled and fulfilled with things, specifically new things and more things. Really, the only difference between the normal American (scary as that thought is) and the Bernie Madhoff or fiscal counterpart, is one chooses to live in multiple layers of priorities, philosophies, and allegiances while the other seems to choose one thing as the final word on all - self. The nice thing about the modern world is that real priorities, philosophies, and allegiances are all coming to the surface, where for hundreds of years they had stayed hidden and secret. Violence, not as reality but as fantasy, now invades our reality in shocking episodes (unlike the violence that has thrived in the world for the entirety of known existence, which, comparatively has decreased, at least in a per capita sense, in the modern world)… Sex is now separating act from person, mind from body, love from making love (not that it was impossible before, but society neither shrugs nor notices the indifference, the loss, the disconnect, except when troubling news reports about children and teens surface and our attitudes are noticeable)….
I really don’t know what to tell you about the world. It’s like we polished clean the mirror that looks through the mirage of life. The more clearly we see the waves rippling above the parched sand of time, the more clearly we know what we’re seeing is more imagination than reality.
I know I didn’t say anything very coherent, when I wanted to tell you that greed, that selfishness, that desire poured onto dead matter, all are the same philosophies that swirl around in us and most of us ignore or deny, when a few people let the incoherent negations of their lives be harmonized into a single, destructive impulse - we cannot be shocked at anyone but the rest of us with a foot in greedy hell and the other clawing for heaven. We spend our lives with a hundred masters. Zacchaeus repented quickly. Material greed isn’t the worst barb in our heart. Could I do as well? Could you?