Hiding From Reality

By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 19, 2010
OP-End Columnist

However you want to define the American dream, there is not much of it that’s left anymore.

Wherever you choose to look — at the economy and jobs, the public schools, the budget deficits, the nonstop warfare overseas — you’ll see a country in sad shape. Standards of living are declining, and American parents increasingly believe that their children will inherit a very bad deal.

We’re in denial about the extent of the rot in the system, and the effort that would be required to turn things around. It will likely take many years, perhaps a decade or more, to get employment back to a level at which one could fairly say the economy is thriving.

Consider this startling information from the Pew Hispanic Center: in the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. But even as the hiring of immigrants picked up during that period, those same workers “experienced a sharp decline in earnings.”

What this shows is not that we should discriminate against foreign-born workers, but that the U.S. needs to develop a full-employment economy that provides jobs for all who want to work at pay that enables the workers and their families to enjoy a decent standard of living. In other words, a resurrection of the American dream.

Right now, nothing close to that is happening.

The human suffering in the years required to recover from the recession will continue to be immense. And that suffering will only be made worse if the nation embarks on a misguided crash program of deficit reduction that in the short term will undermine any recovery, and in the long term will make true deficit reduction that much harder to achieve.

The wreckage from the recession and the nation’s mindlessly destructive policies in the years leading up to the recession is all around us. We still don’t have the money to pay for the wars that we insist on fighting year after year. We have neither the will nor the common sense to either raise taxes to pay for the wars, or stop fighting them.

State and local governments, faced with fiscal nightmares, are reducing services, cutting their work forces, hacking away at health and pension benefits, and raising taxes and fees. So far it hasn’t been enough, so there is more carnage to come. In many cases, the austerity measures are punishing some of the most vulnerable people, including children, the sick and the disabled.

For all the talk about the need to improve the public schools and get rid of incompetent teachers, school systems around the country are being hammered with dreadful cutbacks and teachers are being let go in droves, not because they are incompetent, but strictly for budget reasons. There was a time when the United States understood the importance of educating its young people and led the way in compulsory public schooling. It also built the finest higher education system in the world. Now, although no one will admit it publicly, we’ve decided to go in another direction.

In New York City, for example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s choice to run the public school system is Cathleen Black, a wealthy corporate executive with no background in education whose children attended expensive private schools. Mr. Bloomberg has asserted that Ms. Black’s management expertise will be a boon to the city’s public school children. But the truth is that Ms. Black, if she gets a necessary waiver for her new job, will be presiding over budget cuts that can only hurt the schools. As part of a proposed austerity budget, the mayor is planning to eliminate the jobs of thousands of public school teachers over the next two years. Take that, kids.

We’ve become a hapless, can’t-do society, and it’s, frankly, embarrassing. Public figures talk endlessly about “transformative changes” in public education, but the years go by and we see no such thing. Politicians across the spectrum insist that they are all about job creation while the employment situation in the real world remains beyond pathetic.

All we are good at is bulldozing money to the very wealthy. No wonder the country is in such a deep slide.

We don’t even seem to realize how deep a hole we’re in. If student test scores jumped a couple of points or the jobless rate fell by a point and half, the politicians and the news media would crow as if something great had been achieved. That’s how people behave when they’re in denial.

America will never get its act together until we recognize how much trouble we’re really in, and how much effort and shared sacrifice is needed to stop the decline. Only then will we be able to begin resuscitating the dream.

We need to Pray Rather Than Just Vote

We don’t need to pray for change of government, nor change of politician, nor change of laws. We need to pray for change of hearts, for when the heart changes, the politicians change, the laws change, the will of the people change, and the government changes.

Forgiveness to the Banks but no Forgiveness to Their Customers

The many banks who were helped through the financial crisis are failing their own customers. It seems that our Government, and the people forgave the Banks their debts. The Banks were helped by loans and given time to repay those loans. But the banks have forgotten what reciprocity means. We have gone out of our way to help in this economic crisis and the climate that we now live in. But enough is enough, apparently there has been no lessons learned when it comes to the morality of the many issues that we now face.

With the foreclosure problems, people being locked out of their homes when it is not necessary reminds me of a parable that Jesus taught.

Matt 18:23-35
23 "Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
24 As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.
25 Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
26 "The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.'
27 The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
28 "But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
29 "His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
30 "But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.
31 When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
32 "Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
33 Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?'
34 In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
35 "This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart."

Should the banks be now thrown in jail for their neglect of the people who were their customers? The Banks have been forgiven, will they now forgive in return. But that would be Altruism and that is not the current moral endeavor in this present economic climate.

There has been an impassioned plea for morality in recent weeks, but they are not calling for a return to biblical ethics. Instead, they explicitly reject Christian and Religious morality in favor of a code that exudes selfishness and living in the light of Randian and Libertarian ways.

Though Ayn Rand has been dead for three decades, her philosophy is still embedded in the American way of life. It also has embedded it’s way into our churches by using quasi-biblical principles to obtain wealth but disposing of God’s principles. The big emphasis lately is on homosexuality and promiscuity which have replaced greed as the root of all evil. Gordon Gecko (movie “Wall Street”) is now rolling over in laughter, because greed is good, everything else is bad. So the battle cry for the libertarian worldview, as it is with Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, is replacing the cross with the dollar sign and making that a good thing.

But Altruism is the opposite of Randism/Libertarianism. Though it might seem obvious that altruism is central to the teachings of Jesus, one important and influential strand of Christianity would qualify this. St Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, I:II Quaestio 26, Article 4 states that we should love ourselves more than our neighbor. His interpretation of the Pauline phrase is that we should seek the common good more than the private good but this is because the common good is a more desirable good for the individual. The Apostle Paul in First Corithians 13 says "love seeks not its own interests." We need to shed light on tensions by contrasting the impostors of authentic self-affirmation and altruism such as Randism and Libertarianism. By analysis of other-regard within creative individuation of the self, and by contrasting love for the few with love for the many. Love confirms others in their freedom, shuns propagandas and masks, assures others of its presence, and is ultimately confirmed not by mere declarations from others, but by each person's experience and practice from within. As in practical arts, the presence and meaning of love becomes validated and grasped not by words and reflections alone, but in the making of the connection.

In saying all this, America is in trouble and headed down a path that reflects the good of the corporation over the good of the people. In the Constitution of the United States it says “we the people” and it is heading towards “we the corporations”. The rest of the preamble of the US Constitution reads “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

With Altruism out and Randism/Libertarianism in, that part of the Constitution should read “in order to form a more perfect union, establish greed as good, insure selfishness, provide domestic breakdown, provide corporations with profits by any means, promote the dollar by the dollar, for the dollar for posterity for all corporate holders.

I’m sad as I look out at this once great nation to see it has not learned from history. Everyone thinks this way of Libertarianism is new, it’s not, it’s only new to you. It’s old and it’s called greed at any cost.

Lord forgive us of this root of all evil?

Politics, Sexing, Chaste, Christine O'Donnell - Realities of the Downfall of Marriage

Apparently, Christine O'Donnell is one of the most televised figures in politics. Additionally, her desire to stop the unmarried masses from having sex is astoundingly ambitious. But everyone is making out that it is a bad thing to refrain from sex until being married. The Biblical principals that Christine O'Donnell is following is not bad for anyone. It prevents many of the problems that we now see in our society. The media is poking fun at Ms. O'Donnell and they are all saying that bad is good and good is bad.



The proof is in the pudding, go on ask yourself the question of why do we have the problems in marriages that we have today? Maybe your poking fun because you feel the guilt, if your saying that sexing before marriage is okay, then why do you have to defend yourself on it?