Chris Hedges: "Life is not only about us. We can never have justice until our neighbor has justice.

[kpete]

Chris Hedges' Columns
Throw Out the Money Changers

Oisin Prendiville (CC-BY-SA)
By Chris Hedges

These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.

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The pharisees of high finance who can see us this morning from their cubicles and corner officers mock virtue. Life for them is solely about self-gain. The suffering of the poor is not their concern. The 6 million families thrown out of their homes are not their concern. The tens of millions of pensioners whose retirement savings were wiped out because of the fraud and dishonesty of Wall Street are not their concern. The failure to halt carbon emissions is not their concern. Justice is not their concern. Truth is not their concern. A hungry child is not their concern..



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We must defy the cant of consumer culture and recover the primacy in our lives of mercy and justice. And this requires courage, not just physical courage but the harder moral courage of listening to our conscience. If we are to save our country, and our planet, we must turn from exalting the self, to subsuming of the self for our neighbor. Self-sacrifice defies the sickness of corporate ideology. Self-sacrifice mocks opportunities for advancement, money and power. Self-sacrifice smashes the idols of greed and envy. Self-sacrifice demands that we rise up against the abuse, injury and injustice forced upon us by the mandarins of corporate power. There is a profound truth in the biblical admonition “He who loves his life will lose it.”

Life is not only about us. We can never have justice until our neighbor has justice. And we can never recover our freedom until we are willing to sacrifice our comfort for open rebellion. The president has failed us. The Congress has failed us. The courts have failed us. The press has failed us. The universities have failed us. Our process of electoral democracy has failed us. There are no structures or institutions left that have not been contaminated or destroyed by corporations. And this means it is up to us. Civil disobedience, which will entail hardship and suffering, which will be long and difficult, which at its core means self-sacrifice, is the only mechanism left.

The bankers and hedge fund managers, the corporate and governmental elites, are the modern version of the misguided Israelites who prostrated themselves before the golden calf. The sparkle of wealth glitters before them, spurring them faster and faster on the treadmill towards destruction. And they seek to make us worship at their altar. As long as greed inspires us, greed keeps us complicit and silent. But once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible.

THE REST:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blocking_the_gates_to_the_temples_of_finance_20110418/

[raccoon]

1. ""Life is not only about us." Yeah, wish the big shots of Wall St., Republicans, and Tea Baggers

knew that.

[patrice]

2. Short some degree of out-right evil, whatever it is that you think you want,

you/it will be served best by addressing the whole. The whole includes those who are counter to your own needs/wants/objectives. This is just a re-statement of the Golden Rule and it would work for everyone if each and every person would live by it.

Think of it as a process. If you/anyone get/s what you/they want, what happens to those who oppose that, for whatever reason, or whose needs/wants you/they oppose? How does anyone REALLY win? Does the opposition just go away? Do you/they change? How? What do you/they do?

Getting what you think you want is always affected to some degree by the entire context in which that happens, because the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.