Waking The Dead
From Independence to Resurrection
Identifying the dead or, hopefully, the only sleeping, is, of course, a necessary aspect of resurrection. Can’t raise the living, they are already raised or awake so to speak. So, if comfort, as the Master said, is the cemetery of the spirit, then we know where to find the sleeping, the dying and already dead. They inhabit the Waste Land about which T.S. Eliot talked so eloquently in his great, celebrated, but not heard, praised, but not practiced, poem by that name.
These are the sleep walkers the dying and the dead. These are hollow men the somnambulistic “head pieces filled with straw” about whom T.S. Eliot talked in another of his poems.
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.
To be more specific, these relatively dead whom we must resurrect, are the inhabitants of the so called, rapidly dwindling, “middle class.” These folks are “middle” because they stand, on the scale of material accretions, or shell like bodies that gradually turn humans into lobsters, between the wealthy, most of whom are beyond resurrection because they are already lobsterized or simply beyond resurrection or more bluntly, soul dead, and the dirt poor…meaning that they do not even have any dirt.
“Middle” class, in my life time, has always been an euphuism that meant not really acceptable but not quite noxious. The family had a house, or at least a mortgage they could pay, a car or two. The kids had shoes and relatively stylish clothes to wear. Christmas, a time of incredible disappointment and emotional stress, was still a time of presents even if they were disappointing. We went on vacations around the country. Maybe the mother worked which meant that we could “upscale” a bit, move, maybe a couple of blocks closer to the beach, or to a slightly less obnoxious neighborhood.
It also meant that little attention was paid to anything that did not have to do with sustaining this “life style” at all costs. There were no mental patients walking the streets. In those days. If by chance one had the uncomfortable experience of seeing a mental patient or a homeless person—which was the operative euphemism before there were literally tens of thousands of homeless people who were certifiably sane, able and employable human beings walking the streets and pushing their grocery carts full of black plastic bags and random collectibles that may be useful on a cold night—he or she was ignored. And after a phone call or two, sort of, like a disfiguring weed in the dichondra, the comfort offending person was pulled up, or sprayed with something so he or she would go away.
Little attention, if any, was paid to foreign anything. It took 50,000 dead and several murdered and wounded children at Kent State to get our attention long enough to stop the Viet Nam war. The primary reason the current boondoggle war is entering its ninth or tenth year is that there is no draft. The children who were killed wounded and/or mentally destroyed in Iraq, and are still being killed wounded and/or mentally destroyed in Afghanistan are not members of the Middle Class. They do not disturb our comfort.
So, what’s the wakeup call going to be this time?
In the present economic landscape, it is said that the income of the middle class has stagnated and is falling. It was bound to be that way. Unlike evolution in a cooperative driven system progress in a competition based and driven system devolves. It is a downward spiral motion in which each turn of the spiral gets smaller. Fewer and fewer can make it into the ever tightening wheel of progress. In a 2004 report, the top 1% of our population controlled 50.3% of the total financial assets of the U.S. The bottom 90% only held 14.4% of the total US financial assets. It was estimated that the bottom 20% of this 90% had 0, that is Zero, wealth.
This situation in the past five years has accelerated to the point where some estimates place 70 to 80% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the top 1%. The other 99% shares, very inequitably I might add, the remaining 20% or so. The “dirt poor” have increased correspondingly.
We all know about unemployment. Several millions of us have intimate experience with it and the destruction of any shred of the “American Dream” into which we may have worked ourselves over the years. And for the “lucky” ones, those still employed, the concept of “upward mobility” which was the backbone of the Dream has suffered several fractured vertebrae. It was recently observed by Arianna Huffington that we were behind the French in upward mobility which she compared to the French being behind us in croissants and afternoon sex.
Well, it looks like this situation is finally getting some recognition at least from the millions who have been demoted from the comforting life style of middle classiness and the additional millions who daily hear the threat of their own impending devaluation. The descent into the lower class reality is not anything that these people have ever expected or been prepared for. It is an absolute mind blower. It consists of realities that have been totally out of the vision of comfort into which they were more than likely born and with which they had been accustomed: unemployment, after the 99weeks of unemployment, zero income, eliminating their own, let alone their kids, cell phone coverage. If they still have a house, turning off the heat in every room except the one they are in. Food shopping if they have the cash, at Costco, otherwise looking for food banks at which they will not be recognized. No new shoes. Clothes from the good-will for everyone. Forget Christmas!
It’s like falling off a cliff that has no discernable bottom. The story keeps getting more and more horrendous. Soon there is no medical insurance. You get to watch the children get and stay sick just as you get and stay sick.
This is wake up time. Time to get resurrected. Time do something about this intolerable and totally unfair and un-American situation. This is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Time to be both free and brave. That is if you want Liberty and Justice for all. This is a Soul call. This is the Big Knock on the Door that we needed to wake up.
We can and will straighten this mess out. This is not what the United States of America is about. This is not what we, when we were the Forefathers, gave our lives for. This is not the Nation dedicated to the fact that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
So, what are we going to do? Not just sit here and take it!
From Independence to Resurrection
Identifying the dead or, hopefully, the only sleeping, is, of course, a necessary aspect of resurrection. Can’t raise the living, they are already raised or awake so to speak. So, if comfort, as the Master said, is the cemetery of the spirit, then we know where to find the sleeping, the dying and already dead. They inhabit the Waste Land about which T.S. Eliot talked so eloquently in his great, celebrated, but not heard, praised, but not practiced, poem by that name.
These are the sleep walkers the dying and the dead. These are hollow men the somnambulistic “head pieces filled with straw” about whom T.S. Eliot talked in another of his poems.
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.
To be more specific, these relatively dead whom we must resurrect, are the inhabitants of the so called, rapidly dwindling, “middle class.” These folks are “middle” because they stand, on the scale of material accretions, or shell like bodies that gradually turn humans into lobsters, between the wealthy, most of whom are beyond resurrection because they are already lobsterized or simply beyond resurrection or more bluntly, soul dead, and the dirt poor…meaning that they do not even have any dirt.
“Middle” class, in my life time, has always been an euphuism that meant not really acceptable but not quite noxious. The family had a house, or at least a mortgage they could pay, a car or two. The kids had shoes and relatively stylish clothes to wear. Christmas, a time of incredible disappointment and emotional stress, was still a time of presents even if they were disappointing. We went on vacations around the country. Maybe the mother worked which meant that we could “upscale” a bit, move, maybe a couple of blocks closer to the beach, or to a slightly less obnoxious neighborhood.
It also meant that little attention was paid to anything that did not have to do with sustaining this “life style” at all costs. There were no mental patients walking the streets. In those days. If by chance one had the uncomfortable experience of seeing a mental patient or a homeless person—which was the operative euphemism before there were literally tens of thousands of homeless people who were certifiably sane, able and employable human beings walking the streets and pushing their grocery carts full of black plastic bags and random collectibles that may be useful on a cold night—he or she was ignored. And after a phone call or two, sort of, like a disfiguring weed in the dichondra, the comfort offending person was pulled up, or sprayed with something so he or she would go away.
Little attention, if any, was paid to foreign anything. It took 50,000 dead and several murdered and wounded children at Kent State to get our attention long enough to stop the Viet Nam war. The primary reason the current boondoggle war is entering its ninth or tenth year is that there is no draft. The children who were killed wounded and/or mentally destroyed in Iraq, and are still being killed wounded and/or mentally destroyed in Afghanistan are not members of the Middle Class. They do not disturb our comfort.
So, what’s the wakeup call going to be this time?
In the present economic landscape, it is said that the income of the middle class has stagnated and is falling. It was bound to be that way. Unlike evolution in a cooperative driven system progress in a competition based and driven system devolves. It is a downward spiral motion in which each turn of the spiral gets smaller. Fewer and fewer can make it into the ever tightening wheel of progress. In a 2004 report, the top 1% of our population controlled 50.3% of the total financial assets of the U.S. The bottom 90% only held 14.4% of the total US financial assets. It was estimated that the bottom 20% of this 90% had 0, that is Zero, wealth.
This situation in the past five years has accelerated to the point where some estimates place 70 to 80% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the top 1%. The other 99% shares, very inequitably I might add, the remaining 20% or so. The “dirt poor” have increased correspondingly.
We all know about unemployment. Several millions of us have intimate experience with it and the destruction of any shred of the “American Dream” into which we may have worked ourselves over the years. And for the “lucky” ones, those still employed, the concept of “upward mobility” which was the backbone of the Dream has suffered several fractured vertebrae. It was recently observed by Arianna Huffington that we were behind the French in upward mobility which she compared to the French being behind us in croissants and afternoon sex.
Well, it looks like this situation is finally getting some recognition at least from the millions who have been demoted from the comforting life style of middle classiness and the additional millions who daily hear the threat of their own impending devaluation. The descent into the lower class reality is not anything that these people have ever expected or been prepared for. It is an absolute mind blower. It consists of realities that have been totally out of the vision of comfort into which they were more than likely born and with which they had been accustomed: unemployment, after the 99weeks of unemployment, zero income, eliminating their own, let alone their kids, cell phone coverage. If they still have a house, turning off the heat in every room except the one they are in. Food shopping if they have the cash, at Costco, otherwise looking for food banks at which they will not be recognized. No new shoes. Clothes from the good-will for everyone. Forget Christmas!
It’s like falling off a cliff that has no discernable bottom. The story keeps getting more and more horrendous. Soon there is no medical insurance. You get to watch the children get and stay sick just as you get and stay sick.
This is wake up time. Time to get resurrected. Time do something about this intolerable and totally unfair and un-American situation. This is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Time to be both free and brave. That is if you want Liberty and Justice for all. This is a Soul call. This is the Big Knock on the Door that we needed to wake up.
We can and will straighten this mess out. This is not what the United States of America is about. This is not what we, when we were the Forefathers, gave our lives for. This is not the Nation dedicated to the fact that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
So, what are we going to do? Not just sit here and take it!
