Is it Really "The Economy, Stupid?"

This is what we were told daily by the media and the politicians during the seemingly endless presidential campaign in the US. Were we being brainwashed or is this the real thing that we are all thinking about all the time?

I wonder about this. I think it is possible that the economic question is a sad outcome from our not facing much deeper and much more fundamental problems. Who are we? What do we want from life? Is our current trajectory producing a radiantly healthy happy nation? Are we able to sustain this? Are our relationships wonderful? Are we able to "do unto others as we would have them do unto us"? These kinds of questions have to be having a much more profound effect on us than the simplistic notion that all is well with everyone if we have jobs and money to spend.

I fully know how difficult it is to be without money. I remember more than one Christmas past when our electricity was shut off because I couldn't pay the bill. I know that that is nothing compared to real poverty. We were bringing aid to a Guatemalan refugee camp in Chiapas on New Years and children were dying from starvation next to us. I have seen these devastations up close and personal.

I think the problem of the economy is not scarcity, but distribution. I have seen documentaries of ranchers stampeding cattle off cliffs during the Great Depression because it wasn't worth their while to run them to Chicago to get the meat to the staring east coast people. I have seen a child in Guatemala shot for stealing an avocado from a Dole Plantation. I have seen it.

And don't go thinking that I am a communist or a socialist. I have yet to see a political system that doesn't run into the same dull problems of power and control and greed. I think the solution has to be awareness and experience and most of all grasping the notion that there is enough. There is enough for there to be rich folks, and dignity for ordinary folks, and food for all, and a collective effort to maintain standards of care for all. Mother Earth is all about abundance. If we could make the inner shift to the realization that we would all be safer, happier, healthier if we could care about others, then maybe we could find the political, economic ways to accomplish this.

I think we are still operating on the wild west principle. We can shoot those buffalo for fun and a little profit, or we can strip the mountains for coal or suck out the insides of the earth for oil. What the fuck, there is always the next frontier.

We can't be happy. We don't even look happy to the rest of the world. 40,000,000 people go to bed hungry in the USA and about 1/3 of the country looks like they weigh 300 pounds. It doesn't look happy or healthy. Let's get back to the concept of Brotherly Love, and dig much deeper into the reasons why we need so much defense and killing and turn things around right now. It is not too late.



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