Artemis Alliance Inc.

The Collateral Damage of Greed

And so the king was granted his wish and whatever he touched turned to gold, He ran through the palace with joyful purpose – touching this and presto! Touching that and bingo bongo! Into the garden he raced and reached for a rose. Shazam! The most exquisite gilded beauty … and then he put it to his nose. Oh. No scent. Too bad. So sad. Oh well.

Seeing his beloved daughter in the garden by the fountain, he reached out to kiss the soft blonde curls on her forehead. And lo! There before him a fearsome monument to his own avarice. Forever. No undoing it. No changing his mind. No rethinking the consequences. Once and for all time his daughter was lost to him. Her beauty, her innocence, her laughter, her love, her warmth, her glow, her breath – her life.

Would that she died and could have been buried, the king might have grieved her as lost through a nasty accident – a trick of fate. But no. She was to remain ever before his eyes. Still. Golden. Not dead, but not alive. How terrible to live with the consequence of one’s aberrant choice. Too late to correct or repair – time only for remorse, regret, recrimination. A lifetime of hell.

And what is it to know that we have created our own hell? To know that our actions have not just killed – but have maimed, suffocated, spoiled, decimated all that is beautiful and life giving. And what is an aberrant choice? It is a choice that is anti life. It is a choice that is ignorant of the fact that the balance of life rests on a bee or a pelican – a krill. It is a choice that, to paraphrase Wilde, is based on the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

As a culture, we have become inured to the suffering around us. World Vision competes with Save the Children and we use our media technology to suffer the little children into our living rooms. Their teary infected eyes crusted with flies laying eggs. Picking food from the dust. A tiny child caring for a tinier child – orphaned by war or AIDS or some such man made disaster. The tragedy. The Pathos. We choke up – after all, we have kids – we’re not the monsters, and we get out our credit card.

We mutter about the ‘brown’ neighbourhoods and are slightly distrusting of the communities that grow around the mosque. We are we and they are they and they don’t understand ‘our’ sophisticated society and choose not to blend. And if they are different, can the terrorist ‘blood’ not be pulsing through some veins? Do we pause to think why they might be here? Is it just to take advantage of our luxe – cash rich culture, to rip off our government benefits?

Or might more of the cases be that they desired peace and sanctuary from a home country that is itself gripped in terror. A country where each child has a story of someone they knew and loved who was blasted off the planet before their eyes. Where the noise of nighttime traffic is missiles and tanks. A place where the remote doesn’t ever turn off the violence. Talk about degrees of separation. How far are you away from someone with no arms from a mine? Is there a whole generation of your family born with AIDS? Do you wonder if the water you sip for daily survival is teeming with cholera?

And now – ‘they’ – big business, corporate (name your country), have drilled a hole into the face of this earth – our very mother of nurturance and survival – and released a grim black tide. “Deep Water Horizon” What is that? A title? Will there be Deep Water Horizon, the sequel? If we name it something pretty or exotic or grand will it be less terrible – more media friendly, more culturally digestive? The image of the ‘fondue’ pelican (how twee) has circled the planet and lightening speed – shocking and saddening us. There – on the Internet. There on the TV. Those bastards! But wait.

Do you drive a car? Buy imported coffee? How do your heat – air condition – your home? I think nothing of hopping into my car and driving twenty miles at 110 clicks into ‘the big smoke’ for a hair appointment. Then do it again tomorrow for a lunch meeting. I love Starbucks. I buy imported organic coffee at my local store here in King City. I have no idea how far it got trucked to get here. I monitor the temperature in my home – but hey – who wants to sweat at night? I thought of putting solar panels on my roof to heat the pool, but never quite got to it. So – who is to blame?

It is no one and everyone. If our hungry maw of consumption squawked for alternate forms of energy, there would be no market for oil. ‘Period. Full stop’, as my friend would say. And the ‘bastards’ would scramble for another way of making money – that just might be a bit more conscious (because we would demand by our purchasing power that it would be so).

If we stopped for moment and turned down the volume of Cribs or Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous, we might, as a culture, begin to see that money does not equate superiority. Power, perhaps, but only if we give it over freely. Do the rich give us something we want? Sensationalism in entertainment? Genetically modified, neatly packaged, convenient microwavable food? Cars – sex or status magnets – that change with the season? A McMansion with Scarlett O’Hara staircase cheek by jowl in the community that a short while ago was a field that produced crops? Or is it oil, we crave, perhaps?

Who are the avaricious power mongering unconscious rich – and how did they get that way? In my mind rich is to wealth what glamour is to beauty. One is of the world and the other of the soul. One distracts us and the other nourishes us. There is nothing wrong or negative about money. We should all have plenty. Money will feed the world – every one. Money will clean the water – every drop. Money will provide nourishing untainted food for vitality and health. Money will support art and music and loveliness. Money is a medium of exchange. A very powerful one. But in and of itself it is nothing but paper and metal.

Even gold – being hoarded by some and driving the price to astronomical heights – is of no value at all if it cannot be exchanged for clean water – because there is none. What good is a handful of gold if there is no bread – because ‘we’ have genetically modified our fields to their very death? What good is gold if a father can’t kiss the tender rosebud lips of his child?

‘Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.’ And there is a price for everything. We are a universe of balance. If that side goes up – this side will go down. Ipso facto. What is it you really really want and are you willing to pay the price? Have you stopped to think what the price might actually be – in the long run? For all of time there have been tales of deals with the devil. And who is the devil but the one who gives us exactly what we asked for?

I don’t believe in intrinsic good or evil. Those values are merely opposite sides to the same coin. The yin and yang of perfect balance. The universal law. I do, however, believe that in our collective unconsciousness we as a cohesive interdependent mass of humanity have made a series of unfortunate choices which has put the planet – Gaia – our very source of life – like it or not, romanticize it or not – in a precarious state.

Think about that and create this day by the Golden Rule.

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