Sucks to be Us

My main worry about this economic implosion -- for the country, I mean -- is not merely economic. It's moral and, deeper still, spiritual. This was primarily not just an economic crisis in the first place. It's been moral and spiritual from the start.

We got into this because thirty years of glorifying selfishness and greed as virtues have corrupted us almost beyond recognition. This isn't ordinary human sinfulness; it is sinfulness on steroids. Which is exactly what a stunted-into-perpetual-infancy society on steroids is bound to become. So much for our big swing to the political and religious "Right."

The last time conservative Republican idiocy led this country to near-ruin, we had at least some residual decency left to pull us together, help us recognize our common humanity and see us through. It hasn't been "liberalism" that has corrupted us. These past three decades -- over which conservatives have been so insistent to have sole rule -- have nearly destroyed our ability to recover.

Everyone who still has a job, and a house, and a functioning life, looks at those who seem to be losing everything and thinks, "Oh, well...sucks to be you."

Frankly, it sucks to be ALL of us.

Not only because it could be anybody tomorrow, and perhaps all of us the next day, but because we no longer even seem to realize how connected we are to each other -- whether we want to be or not.

Human beings did not survive, from the stone age all the way 'til the space age, merely by "competing" with other human beings. That alone would, sooner or later, have driven us into extinction. No, human beings made it this far by cooperating and figuring out how to get along. By recognizing that a situation dangerous to one might very likely be one that endangered all.

Of course there must be some competition between us in order to make us strive to be our best. But if that isn't healthily balanced with cooperation, it will...well, it will lead to what's happening right now.

Our only hope is the sharp veer to the Left -- and back to sanity -- those in the nation who have not completely lost their minds are now attempting. Of course the barbarian children are trying to stop us. And of course we can't let them.

It does indeed suck to be them. But it doesn't have to suck, after all, to be the rest of us.

Yes, we evolved from apes. But we're not just apes anymore. God got us here how "He" got us here. And if we truly believe that Jesus revealed Who God is, then we need to remember what that has to mean for us. We have evolved into beings who are moral and spiritual, as well as animal.

I will make this perfectly clear. It is impossible to genuinely live according to the conviction that Jesus is the Word of God made flesh and yet support -- or even condone -- letting society function like some gigantic jungle.

It's time to free Jesus. The barbarian children have been holding Him hostage.

Too bad they don't understand that according to God's scheme, it doesn't have to suck to be anybody.