Can We Get Down To What's Really Wrong?

The only warm and fuzzy part of this post will be the song whose lyric I nicked for the title to this post, Van Morrison's "Caravan".  Might as well let it play while you read the rest of the post...



Here's how I feel about, well, the state of things:

When several things appear to be wrong at the same time, there is really only one thing wrong.

Let me expand a bit. On several fronts, life in these United States is off-kilter and somehow less-than-satisfactory in important ways, and--more important--different groups of people share this feeling but disagree about the reasons. Difficult to explain, perhaps, but not difficult to exploit.

Let me yoke this to some real-world examples. I'll be brief, and use shorthand. Because I'll bet you know I'm talking about:

Symbiotic Wall Street & Congress. Lifeless Corporate Food. Endless War Making.  Skyrocketing Health Care. Automotive Industry Failure. Mountains of Credit & Worthless Mortgages. Metastasizing Chain Stores. Increasingly Ludicrous Warning Labels. Empty Punditry and Celebrity. Environment For Sale. "Green" For Sale. Cheapened Language. Sex-Fueled Imagery. Cheapest Consumer Goods. News For The Stupid and The Scared.

If we lived in huts and relied on the King's largess to sustain the Kingdom in difficult times, such merry-making by the aristocrats would lead to necks in the guillotine and blood in the streets. Instead, enough of us drive gleaming chariots and feast on an endless supply of food, brought from the four corners or created in laboratories, that it would never cross our minds to change The Way Things Are.

Something lurks beneath this. We share it. It is collective even when it appears not to be. And whatever "it" is, it has seeped into every part of our society. We pour it into our institutions and we feed on what these institutions churn out, until nothing we touch is free from it.

Have the past 200+ years been the exception? If so, do we glimpse our true nature in these times? Is it for us, here, now--or others, in another time and place--to deliver the next punch to fate's jaw so that humans might be dragged one more step out of the mire?

I wonder...

Anyway, think about "It" for a while, won't you? I have some ideas, I hope you will, too.