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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15 |
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Jay Elias | You can take it with you
"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II
2002-06-28- 12:33 a.m.
Commencement
Today I’m wondering a little bit about what it means that I live in a country where we can’t seem to come up with a way to test major league baseball players earning an average salary of over one-point-six million dollars a year for steroids, but we can force every Tom and Jane who go out for a public school softball team to piss in a cup to prove they aren’t smoking pot on the weekends.
I might have responded by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, except it seems that isn’t going to be allowed in public schools anymore either. I suppose it is a good thing for those in favor of one nation, under God that their children can recite the pledge to their hearts’ content at any number of Catholic schools that they can attend with vouchers reaped from my (and your) tax dollars. Who will likely be the only students literate enough to recite the pledge, since the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the obligation of the state to provide an education only requires that students learn enough to be able to work as unskilled laborers and serve jury duty, which the Court feels ranks somewhere between eighth and ninth grade.
In God we trust. Damn right. Seeing as I’m not so foolish as to put my faith in the American judiciary. Or Major League Baseball. Fucking contraction.
Not that this is anything new or anything different. Today, WorldCom will collapse, costing not only the livelihoods of its twenty thousand employees, but over four billion dollars of losses in stock value. Does that not seem like much of a big deal? It is easy to disregard in a way; after all, aren’t stockholders pretty much the same lousy profiteering bastards who ran the company into the ground in the first place? Well, no, not entirely. You know who loses? The ordinary person, again. Pension plans invest in the markets in numbers that make Dick Cheney look like a piker. In New York alone, state-run pensions for such people as the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the New York Police Department, and the Fire Department of New York have lost ten million dollars in the last week on WorldCom. When WorldCom is added up with Tyco, Enron, Global Crossing, and Martha Stewart Omnimedia, the total losses add up to about four hundred billion dollars.
These numbers were printed in today’s New York Post. The paper had the temerity to run them concurrent with an editorial about what New York needs to do to push the last few off of its welfare rolls. Yes, it is of course those damn welfare mothers again, making our nation poor and our taxes high. I’m sure they cost New Yorkers ten million in the last week.
By the way, the government response to the latest multi-billion dollar disaster in our economy? President Bush was “visibly upset”, and Fed Chairman Greenspan decided not to raise interest rates. Oh, and the Vice President will still fight the GAO subpoena to disclose his notes from his meetings with industry leaders. Way to go guys. Perhaps you can bust some guy slinging burgers at Wendy’s for telling his friends once that he wanted to join Al Qaeda. That will keep us distracted, for a few days at least, while our economy grows smaller by another two or three billion.
I don’t mean to make any of you despair, at least not completely. Unfortunately, I lack the gift with words to give you any words of my own of encouragement during all this. So I will turn to someone else, in hope that we can all, well, hope.
“Will the world end if you act? Will the world end anyway, even if you find an organization, stuff envelopes, give money, organize? Maybe. Quite possibly. These are monstrous times and there’s no telling. Look across the globe – when have you ever seen such a dismaying crew in occupation of every seat of power, a certifiable nutcase here, a tinpot dictator there, a feckless, blood-spattered plutocrat in this office, an unindicted war criminal in that office, miscreants, meshugenas, maniacs, and every one of them has the means of doing the most appalling damage. You aren’t fundamentalists, you have had a superb education and you have learned how to read, you have learned that all reading is interpretation; you are smart readers, but we’ve failed miserably to educate the world, and so there are many poor readers out there, many fundamentalists, and every one of them has the means of doing the most appalling damage. Everyone who wants can do quite a lot toward bringing the world to an end.
“But hope isn’t a choice, it’s a moral obligation, a human obligation, an obligation to the cells in your body. Hope is a function of those cells, it’s a bodily function the same as breathing and eating and sleeping. Hope is not naïve, hope grapples endlessly with despair. Real, vivid, powerful, thunderclap hope, like the soul, is at home in darkness, is divided; but lose your hope and you lose your soul, and you don’t want to do that, trust me, even if you haven’t got a soul, and who knows, you shouldn’t be careless about it. Will the world end if you act? Who can say? Will you lose your soul, your democratic-citizen soul, if you don’t act, if you don’t organize? I guarantee it. And you will be really embarrassed at your ten-year class reunion. People will point, I promise you; people always know when a person has lost his soul. And no one likes a zombie, even if, from time to time, people will date them.”
- Excerpted from Tony Kushner’s commencement address to the graduates of Vassar College, May 26, 2002.
Copyright © 2001, 2002 - EoZ
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If you want to make me
famous or just complain: Jay Elias -
jelias@diaryland.com
Older
Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02
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