Growing Pains

Don't blame the bankers, brokers, corporate leaders and politicians. They're just playing their roles. It's another expression of survival of the fittest. A squirrel is bound to harvest as many nuts as it can. It's not keeping count. It just knows that more is better. Our present society has been evolving into this unjust, unsightly and inhumane manifestation since before its inception. The current faces of our economic, industrial and political systems have been raised to play the parts they've adopted. The name of their game is “more”. More power, more money, more influence, more more. It's no wonder that they haven't developed the compassion of saints. It's not in their job description. They were taught and encouraged to become the greedy little squirrels that they are. If they weren't filling the ranks, someone else would. Our current society demands it. As one occupier's sign read - “The system's not broken, it was built this way”.

Our species is in its uncomfortable adolescence, and we're going through growing pains. Like a snake aching to shed its skin, we're finally feeling a compulsion to shed habituated self serving attitudes that don't actually serve our higher aspirations or best interests. A young child is only concerned with its immediate wants and needs. As it grows, it learns that friends, family and community are important, in and of themselves, as well as, for the individual's well being and happiness. The young child doesn't see that its constant demands take a toll on its mother's health, just as humans have largely been oblivious to how our demands on our mother have been detrimental to her health. And a sick mother can't properly tend to her children's needs. A mature child can see when its mother is failing, feel empathy toward her and act more compassionately – even to the point of becoming the caretaker. Humanity has had voices of conscience pleading to attend its mothers needs for hundreds of years and they've been growing increasingly more insistent over the last half a century. Finally, it's starting to sink into our collective consciousness enough to begin to overwrite the attitudes of childish self obsession. And like a child, who would live solely on candy, oblivious to the warnings and consequences, we have been living for pleasure and immediate gratification to the detriment of our growth and health, too. As a child can't imagine acting in the best interests of it future self, we seem unable to act in the best interests of our future generations. It's time to adopt more intelligent directives and make choices that nurture and serve us over the long run, if we want to be healthy, grow strong and live long as a species. Children are fooled by appearances, and think others can be fooled by the same. So toys are shoved under the bed to give the illusion of cleanliness, vegetables are tucked under a napkin to make it look like they've been eaten and over sized shoes are donned to make it seem as though they're all grown up. But putting on mom's shoes doesn't qualify a kid to drive her car, and we've been behind the wheel without a license for some time. Now we've left the road and are heading toward catastrophe.

Plowing through the ditch has slowed us down a little, but as the eyes of reason and compassion strain to see over the steering wheel the body of society is trying to stand on the feet of power brokers, which is pushing the gas pedal down even more. And there are tall trees directly in front of us. The talking heads keep referring to our getting back to where we were, intimating that it was a healthy intelligent way to be. But the cause of our current dilemma is that we were driving too fast, in the first place. We need to spend more energy on choosing our course and less on increasing our speed. The societal model of consumerism that we've all grown up in was ill conceived from the beginning. It requires exponentially compounding consumerism to work. And that's simply not realistic, for myriad reasons. The priorities that have governed our ambitions are skewed by our presumption that this model is practical, functional and sustainable. We're children with blankets tied around our necks, believing that we can fly. The bankers, brokers and politicians are cheering us on and urging us to jump, but (mostly) we're all complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that's been handed down from previous generations, who'd been blinded by the delusion they were sold. Let's just hope that we out grow the juvenile fantasy before we jump off of the precipice that we're so precariously poised on the edge of.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is rarely easy, seamless or without angst. Now is the time for humanity to grow into a sensible, respectful, mature species, that will intelligently and compassionately tend to the needs of the greater whole, while respecting the needs and rights of all individuals. This is no small order; but, in the same way that a teen or an adult is bound for catastrophe if he doesn't act with maturity, it's well past time for us to “act our age” unless we want to live with the extreme consequences that are bound to come as a result of our negligence.