Is there anything left to save?

For reasons that I will go into at another time, at last check, in my mind, the following things are seriously, if not irreparably, broken (and this applies universally):

• ourselves (self-absorption, self-centeredness, greed)
• our societies (competition instead of cooperation; blame-the-victim mentality)
• our environment (global warming, excessive carbon emissions)
• our political system (totalitarian regimes, pseudo-democracies, special interests)
• our monetary system (irrespective of currency, debt-based)
• our financial system (value of debt grossly exceeds value of what we can produce)
• our economic system (too few have's & too many have-nots, unequal opportunity)
• our infrastructure (insufficient tax revenues, privatization, special interests)
• our education system (test-score mania, privatization, excessive costs)
• our justice system (Bradley Manning, incarceration rate, SCOTUS)
• our value system (theocracies, pseudo-theocracies, social Darwinism)

Oh, I suppose the list goes on, but that's about all I can handle at the moment. I'm neither whining nor complaining. Rather, I'm merely observing. For each one of these areas there are, without a doubt, more than enough "experts" running around with diagnoses and panaceas, and for the most part, these are well-meant, but nevertheless wrong. Each one looks at its own given area and ignores that some other area is equally affected. If we weren't so screwed up ourselves, our societies would be in better shape. If we had a reasonable monetary or financial system, the economy wouldn't be such a problem, and there's a lot that could be done about the environment, education, and infrastructure. That kind of thing.

Overarching everything, though, I would place our value system, for it is this that determines, at least in a sense, what it is we care about at all. Although religion once attempted to do that (and I'll let history be the judge of how successful it has been ... for it was, and to a certain extent still is, the case that religion provided different cultures a common meeting ground), that, too, has devolved into a mumble-jumble of creeds, factions, and belief systems that simply legitimize -- well, attempt, rather unsuccessfully, I might add, to legitimize -- one group's superiority over another. That is especially what religious fundamentalism (of any flavor) is all about.

It is possible, by virtue of some yet-foreseen miracle that we might be able to salvage (I'm not sure about save) perhaps the infrastructure, perhaps parts of the environment (but I doubt enough), but that's about it. Without a value system, an agreed-to set of values that are valid and applicable to everyone -- regardless of race, color, religion, creed, culture, or nationality -- we will never be able to decide which of the items on that list we should even try to save.

Why am I less than optimistic? Well, because of the first item on that list: ourselves. When it comes to change, we all know, that is definitely something that everyone else needs to do, but not ourselves, and that's one reason we can never work off the list. If you can't get past the first item, you've no chance of ever getting to the end. It will just be the end.