How much is left?

Whenever change happens, especially sudden or drastic change, there is a general feeling of loss. Whoever is benefitting from the change, of course, doesn't notice it. They are generally excited and want to maintain the new state as the status quo. At the current time, the changes with which we are faced are not benefitting the vast majority of the earth's inhabitants. The vast, vast majority of people this time around are losing out.

To see this, you have to step back from your own situation. Sure, you might have a steady job, but how many of your former co-workers are no longer with the company? Are you working more or fewer hours and is your paycheck still going as far as it used to? What about all those other "problems" we keep hearing about? Immigration, unemployment, same-sex marriage, restriction of legal rights because of terrorism, rampant and worldwide fundamentalism, climate change, energy dependency? The list never seems to stop.

We just recently avoided another stupid and senseless war, but none of played out as most of the West expected. It was, to be perfectly honest, bizarre. A ruthless and blood-thirsty dictator may or may not have been responsible for a heinous crime that the chastisers were already guilty of, yet the armed escalation was headed off by an unsavory autocrat with a poor record of human rights at home, while we all know full well that the alleged victims of the crime are a loose confederation of interests, every bit as brutal and savage as the dictator they are fighting. There was nothing about that situation that was right, in any sense of the word.

For anyone willing to look, it was clear that the entire confrontation was valueless, and worthless as well. Bombs can't solve problems. The possibility of finding a just war is slim to none. We're slowly realizing that violence does little more than beget violence, and lots of us are simply getting weary of the non-solutions to real issues and problems. We speak of democracy, but don't practice it ourselves (or what is all that voter-restriction legislation and gerrymandering about in the US?). We speak of liberty, and enact draconian and oppressive legislation (NDAA, etc.). We speak of peace and threaten with military force. We speak of tolerance and refuse to compromise with, or sometimes even talk to, our adversaries and opponents. If there ever was a mess, this was one, and it pushed us hopelessly toward the brink, again.

Now, more than ever, it is time for all of us to start thinking seriously about what is important to us, and what we are willing to allow "the others", whoever they may be. In framing our entire discussion in economic terms (gains, losses, costs, benefits, risks, transactions, trade, sanction ... the list goes on), we have eliminated a very important dimension of our lives: morality. Oscar Wilde once remarked that a cynic is a person who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and that is where we have ended up. It is a sad state, to be sure. Cynics are never happy people. I simply cannot help but think that we can do better than this. The question is: can we?

What is good and fair and just and honorable and upright and worthwhile need to be brought back into focus, even knowing full well (or at least suspecting) that there may not be one single, universal answer to the question.