[Vision2020] Hollow Men

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (January 4, 2012) Moscow-Pullman Daily News with special thanks to Doug Hughes of Moscow.

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Hollow men
 
For years before I retired from Washington State University, I had taped to my office door these words by the English novelist John Fowles:

"Agora, or money-obsessed, societies produce hollow men. They produce dissatisfied men, because the power to buy is as habit-forming as heroin; one is dead before one has enough. They produce guilty men, because too few have too much, and too many are savagely punished for their innocent poverty and ignorance. Somewhere each day the stick-limbed child the too much could have saved DIES."
 
These words came back to me in this political and economic climate when I read this astonishing statistic from the census data: nearly one out of three Americans - 100 million persons - live in poverty or near-poverty at the moment, and the Great Recession is certainly worsening the situation. The patent economic inequality many Americans now recognize and object to or protest against is epitomized in these poor and their children, stick-limbed or not.
 
We've heard the word greed uttered frequently as Wall Street, banks, corporations, pharmaceuticals stack their piles of money. We hear conservative politicians, including those vying for the GOP presidential nomination, defend these institutions and pledge never to raise taxes and work to cut programs for the underclass, but not the subsidies to oil companies and agribusiness.

These are truly the hollow souls, those lacking imagination, compassion and charity, this last a principle of the true followers of Christ.

One of the bitterest ironies in the present political environment is the attitude of the self-righteous religious right and the "too much" toward the dispossessed. Ah, as the expression goes, "What would Jesus do or say?"

Doug Hughes
Moscow

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Excellently stated.  Thanks.

Seeya later, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Spokane, Washington

"If not us, who?
If not now, when?"

- Unknown