Month: May 2020

I’ve heard that “Money Talks!” Is that connected with feelings or just another way of saying, “Shut up! The Master is Telling!”?

Were money to notice, beyond its current location, that some of its siblings are concentrated in gated housing (financial establishments) and other relations were scattered but slowly migrating toward a universal reunion—would it laugh or cry?

Always there is the likely acknowledgment that money is but a pawn moved by a market’s finger. But feelings? None.

When those influenced by money have a surplus, it is easy to see a habit that escalates to never having enough.

When those influenced by money have a deficiency, it is easy to fixate on an increase-of-money as a solution.

When those influenced by money have sufficient, it is miraculous.

When finance measures meaning, it uses a magic elastic ruler. Those with a deficit turn out to be, on average, three-fifths of a person. Those with a surplus are granted possessions up to several billion deficient persons. Those who think they have about the right amount, are mostly dry drunks who would not risk the economic system to benefit its enslaved.

Always, the odds of economic change are at least 2:1 against. Even when a teensy virus reveals monetary pain next door, inertia enervates. A muted “tsk-tsk” is all that is heard in the land. Still, an opportunity to shift the conversation about what a compassionate economy would actively rank differently than a capitalist economy is present multiple times during this and every day.

Questions arise: How many opportunities have I already missed? Will I be ready for the next one? Ultimately, can Mammon be regulated or otherwise agree to any limit? If so, where is that boundary?

A virus is too small for unaided eyes to see. Yet, it is currently bringing down thousands of “centers-of-the-universe,” as surprised as Goliath at what a littl’n just did to him. At the same time, a teensy Coronid is aided and abetted by a lumbering Emperor of the Empire. When joined in equally mindless quests for self-perpetuation, Loud was and will be a next fall.

The effect of butterfly wings half-a-world away is revealed in exponentially larger results at our elbow. Our unconsidered wake returns the favor.

With a large enough population, yet unknown epigenome changes may have added resistance, for some, to a particular virus (“poison”). In such a way, the basic genome can continue. Hooray for wrestling at the microscopic level as well as in the heavenly realms. Both are beyond us and catch us middlers in conflicts, not of our making.

A usual approach to social conflict is to cast it in terms of power. Time after time, it is apparent that an appeal to a “better angel” is a lost cause. In such cases, small resistances of a meal-in-common and guerrilla actions are the only routes open. These are still available, even in the presence of quarantine rules about distancing and martial hyper-surveillance.

Sometimes we are the small, threatened by the large. Sometimes we are the large, threatened by the small. Finding ourselves caught between is ordinary life. Here we are—breathing and responding between an unexpected-and-unasked-for birth and an all-too-expected death masking its specific from-what and when.

May we use our everyday opportunities to navigate our responses of entitlement and humility wisely. It will be all too easy to falsely deploy each. Odds are it will take a community of mutual partners to assist one another. May we learn to honor such a dynamic and seemingly trivial engagement.

May Day has a heritage of celebrating Spring as well as supporting Workers. Both further fade during a time of quarantine.

As politics show us over and over, Fear works. When we get outside for a moment of spring after the cabin-fever inducing Winter, we know we are soon going to distance ourselves back inside. Who knows who ran through this space just before we arrived. Even sunlight cannot be trusted to disinfect a virus clinging to the dark side of a dust mote.

Yes, Fear works, and the negative political ads have begun their next round with their usual selectivity of images yanked from their context and portrayed in the worst possible light. At best, Workers’ well-being has plateaued but mostly has become brittle over the past decades and generations. The myths of trickle-down economics and right-to-work legislation have proven to be mirages. Nonetheless, they have weakened Workers’ ability to leverage their energy against the inertia of financial greed squirreled away in ever bigger off-shore barns. The thin stream of paychecks coming just-in-time to keep bankruptcy and eviction at bay have been furloughed, laid off, and boarded up.

May Day. A day of contrast caught between a breath of fresh air and a mask. A day between honor for everyday work upon which wealth relies and being ignored unto death to keep wealth flowing upward.

May Day. A day of one more opportunity to choose how we will care for earth and one another. A day of clarifying our analysis of how we have come to hope’s shadow side. A day of stating an intention to engage our culture and its systems of violence and asking others to hold us accountable for more than immediate comfort (first, to do no harm). A day of considering consequences and considered commitment (second, to do good). 

May Day. A day to remember times of gain, times of loss; times rent apart, times sewn together; times of love, times of hate. May this May Day be a Day to keep eyes on a prize only graspable seven generations after us and thus a time for Peace for which we swear, “It’s not too late!”