Complacency and the cost of souls

Time To Wake Up
And Smell the Economy

By Jon Ronnquist
"Information Clearinghouse"
December 18, 2008
Here at last then is the defining moment of our time, our legacy to whatever lies beyond this cataclysmic failure of the human race. For the want of understanding, the kingdom was lost. And all this in what could have been the golden age of mankind.

Call it scare mongering, call it incitement of panic, hell call it terrorism for all that catchphrase means. Just don't say I didn't warn you. The proverbial has hit the fan and the mess is going to be almighty.

By all valid accounts, which is to say all those you won't hear about, the linchpin of the global economy, the all mighty US Dollar, is on a death march. We are not talking about deflation either, this is going to be a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere. And with it will go everything and everyone whose plans, wealth and future was pinned on it, namely the western world as we know it.

How did this happen? Who is responsible? Why did we let it go so far? I suspect these questions will reach the lips of untold numbers before we see another winter. They are valid questions. Perhaps the only ones left that are worth asking. So let us not abandon them to posterity along with the ruins.

What looms on the horizon now is not a season for humility but the inevitable itself. This is the human race collapsing in on itself at the end of a long and slow process of rot which was eating away at the third world long before it reached the golden shores of the west. For a time we were all kings, walking tall beneath the banner of imagined destiny. In the east the grateful poor toiled at our behest and sang songs of praise to their generous masters beyond the sea. Or so we dreamt even as we watched them dead and dying at the hands of our henchmen. Now that our halls are crumbling beneath the weight of our own greed and false complacency, let us not dishonour the dead with our hollow pleas of innocence and ignorance. It is only we who do not yet know real suffering, to the world at large it has long since become a matter of course.

Were we manipulated into complacency? Of course we were. Does that absolve us of responsibility? Of course it doesn't. Our very laws are founded on the principle that it can't. It is all too easy to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of evil men. But you cannot stone the slave auctioneer when you are a profiteer of his trade. See reason and banish him by all means, but do not court hypocrisy by false disassociation.

I do not say that there is nothing left for which to fight. On the contrary this economic end of days may yet see us able to buy back our very souls. It is after all the first thing we lost and the most promising foundation for a newer and better world. But if that opportunity for amnesty does present itself, it must be extended to all or we will surely forfeit that most valuable of possession for good.

Stupidity, not economics, is the stepping stone to mass manipulation. Wise men do not buy fool's gold. Complaisance, selfish interest and false neutrality are the aftermath, not the catalyst of the human tendency to look away. But stupidity is the key. And to support the status quo after all it has taught us would be the final act of human ignorance for sure. Not to mention a pointless one.

To see this collapse of global finance as a problem would be short-sighted indeed. Of course in the west that seems to be the crime of which we are universally guilty, one and all. We must stop seeing the world in the false terms in which we have been schooled to look at it. Only then can we begin to appreciate that what is dying before us is only doing so because we didn't save it when it could still be saved. In it's current form, the system is beyond redemption. Any effort to piece this global economy back together will amount to nothing more than the penultimate concentration of wealth in history. A concentration so great that talk of police states and new world orders would cease to be talk all together. If you believe that another loan will see you through this rough patch and into open seas on the other side, you have not understood what is happening.

I do not say these things lightly. I myself am scarred to death of the uncertainties which lie ahead. But when the hammer falls at least I will not become paralysed with dumb shock. And whatever I do make of my future, I know it will not look anything like my past and that is a blessing.

Wake up or sleep tight. The time for easy options is running out.

Over and out.