My computer crashed last month. I was advised that the hard drive had failed and would need to be replaced. That meant that all my memory would be lost. Every e-mail I had sent or received, all the music I had stored on I Tunes, all my pictures of family and friends, and all my written work including all my past columns, my novel, which in the process of being reprinted, and my book on metaphysics, which was backed up on another system, thank G-d. I took the great loss well and I started thinking about memory and its loss. My novel concerned one person who was destined to be forever forgotten and another who lost his memory of himself. The loss of memory was a punishment for the first character and a blessing for the other. What is our memory to us?
When I first studied psychology in the early 60s, I was taught about a concept called "the halo effect." The concept or theory was that first impressions color the way a person is forever regarded and remembered. If a person had been considered bright and honorable at first meeting, everything he did from then on would seem somewhat bright and honorable. A few years later, while in college I had a chance to test the theory. I was the French teacher's favorite and best student. I was bright and hard working and got A's on my first tests. But by the end of the semester, I had missed some tests and done badly in others. My teacher viewed me as a poor student who just didn't have what it took. She remembered the last few weeks of school rather than the first impression, which had seemed justified for most of the semester. I realized it was the most recent experience that colored our memory of people and events and not the first.
Take the weather. If it is warm and sunny in San Francisco for a week, people say that it has been that way forever. When the weather changes and it is cold, foggy and or wet for a few days, people say that this weather seems like it will never end.
Or take relationships. People have a great relationship for a period of time. Then something happens to make them split a part. If it was a bad ending, there is a good chance that it will make the memories of the good times less so. It was the last experiences that revealed the true nature of the person and the relationship.
Or take retail. Do you remember what Abercrombie and Fitch used to be? It was a totally different store that specialized in high end sports equipment. In the 1950s I was big into ping pong and would buy my special paddles at Abercrombies. It was not a store for young people wanting to be sexy. But who remembers that? Do you remember what Banana Republic sold and why they chose their name? They sold surplus uniform items from banana republics.
And then there is our lack of memory about taxes. The highest marginal tax rate is threatening to go from 35% to 39.6%. People are screaming "unfair exorbitant tax increase on the rich." The 35% top rate was part of the former administration's temporary tax cut for those in the highest tax bracket. “It means that when adding state, local and payroll taxes, the wealthiest among us will be paying almost half their earnings in tax. What will it do to productivity when people see so much of their earnings taken from them?” the well-to-do ask. We forget that it is a marginal tax rate which means it is applied to only the highest part of the person's net income. (So for a person making $500,000, with $100,000 in deductions and a net of $400,000 would pay an extra 4.6% on the $42,000 over $358,000, (the beginning of the top bracket, or $1932 more in taxes. This is less than four tenths of one percent (.38%) of their income We also forget that this is what the top earners paid from the 1980's to just a few years ago. But we also forget something else. While America was its most productive, from 1946 to about 1980, the highest marginal tax rate in America was 90%.
I remember growing up in an upper middle class family where my father earned about $40,000 a year in the 1950's. He paid at a 50% marginal tax rate so whenever he lamented the cost of something, like my boarding school, he would double the amount because he figured, incorrectly, that all of his earnings were taxed at the 50% rate and therefore everything actually cost twice as much net income dollars.
But a bad memory is also a plus. We forget some of our past prejudices as our culture evolves taking us along with it. The latest presidential primaries and election were cases in point. One major party picked an African-American over the wife of its most successful past president and then over an good old boy, really white guy who was the son and grandson of full admirals. It showed that many of us have forgotten our past racism enough to give an excellent candidate a chance to make a difference.
Our bad memory helps when we must forgive someone's past transgressions and find it harder and harder to remember exactly what they had been or why they mattered so much. It helps us forget some of the pain that life provides us so generously. We have forgotten how painful the pregnancy was so that we can look forward to having more children or the pain of open heart surgery so that we can face it again when it needed five, ten, or 15 years later. It surprised me when my reaction to being told I needed open heart surgery again made warm salt water cover my cheeks. My body still remembered the trauma even though my mind had forgotten.
But, perhaps, what we should never forget is how lucky we are to be alive and that no matter how hard life seems to us, it could always be a lot worse. And we should not forget those who love us and those who have helped us. And we should try to remember that no matter what we did, it was the best we could do at the time and that there is plenty of room for improvement in the future. And that if this applies to us, then it should also apply to everyone else as per Kant's categorical imperative.
And, if you don't agree with any of this, then you can just forget about it.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
Where is Our Fourth Estate?
Over the last few years, the country has lost some of its best journalists, most notably Tim Russet, Peter Jennings and Walter Cronkite, one of the greatest of all. Their successors lamented their passing promising to try to carry on their proud tradition.
But have they?
With a few exceptions, the members of the mainstream mass media have failed to live up to that legacy. In large part, the newspaper and television coverage of events is either shamelessly excessive or terribly shallow and incomplete.
When it comes to covering the big stories like severe hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, or earthquakes, the media reports from the scene, ad nauseam. The death figures change by the hour from being ridiculously small to being record-breaking. Every detail of the disaster is reviewed and repeated, incessantly. We are forced to see the worst of the tragedy until it saturates our consciousness. We are invited to look at as many ruined buildings and shattered lives as possible.
When 9/11 came into our lives we were shown footage of the crash not just dozens of times but hundreds or even thousands of times, as though picking at a wound.
Then here was the tsunami in Indonesia, the flooding in New Orleans, the terrible storms in the Midwest, the landing on the Hudson, and then the earthquake in Haiti. The media could not seem to spend enough time on these events. The anchors were obliged to leave the warmth of their studios to venture into these crises. Reporters informing us of killer weather must actually be in that weather to report on it even if they are falling down or can hardly see.
During these disasters, no other news occurs or, at least, is reported. There is no war overseas, no crime in the streets, no child lost or abandoned. There is just the one main story that is designed to reveal just how loving and compassionate we all are.
But then, for all other news on regular news days, the journalists can’t seem to get or share all the information necessary to tell the story.
Here are some cases in point.
The governor of New York at the time was accused of having an expensive night with a prostitute. Every day we heard about him and the prostitute and how much she charged to fly to give him service. What they did not report immediately or even weeks later was that this john was a regular customer for many years dating back to the days that he was the state’s attorney general. At that time he vigorously prosecuted the major houses of prostitution except for the one he frequented.
When reporting on economic news, the media neglects to connect all the dots. For the past few years, the country’s recession has caused a high unemployment rate. The current administration is trying to help by pumping money into the economy causing a large budget deficit. It has been two years now and the unemployment stands at just under 10%, twice as much as it should be. When this is discussed, it is rarely, if ever mentioned that when the last great recession occurred during the Reagan administration, Reagan tried for five years to reduce the unemployment rate he inherited from his predecessor. He lowered taxes for the rich and thereby incurred record deficits.
It took FDR nine years to end the depression after creating record deficits and finally needed World War II to get us back to “normal.”
Our President has been forced into a record budget deficit because of the disaster left him by the former administration. The deficit is now $13 trillion with Obama’s first year shortfall of more than $1 trillion. The right wing media is howling that we are at $13 trillion because of Obama. No one has mentioned that the $12 trillion deficit that Obama did not cause, came to us from Reagan and Bush, the Right’s heroes. The deficit actually decreased under Clinton, the Right’s villain.
The country suffers from serious immigration problems. Poor, unskilled, uneducated masses are coming into our country illegally. It is estimated that there are now 12-20 million document-free immigrants in this country, breaking laws and taking jobs away from Americans who really need the work. No one mentions that this problem got bad when Reagan gave those in the country illegally at that time amnesty and did not secure our borders. This gave tens of millions of poor Latin Americans hope that if they could get here illegally, get good paying work without having to pay income or payroll taxes, they too would eventually be handed keys to the Promised Land as did their countrymen before them.
During the Presidential campaign, the minority-party candidate made two strange, but unchallenged, statements. To this date I have not heard one media person point out the absurdity of the comments.
The first was a reaction to the opponent’s promise to eliminate tax cuts for the rich that were put in place by his predecessor on a temporary basis. The reclaimed taxes would be used the help fund needed services. The candidate from Arizona accused his Democratic rival of being in favor of using taxes for the redistribution of wealth. Not one person so far has reminded the senator that government exists to provide needed services by redistributing wealth. All taxation dating back to the Dark Ages has been collected for the redistribution of wealth, be it from the farmers to the rich nobles or from the taxpayer for the services needed by the population whether they be national defense or urban planning and development or welfare for the poor. I have not heard one media person ever point this out.
The second was regarding not deporting the many document-free immigrants currently in our country. The compassionate conservative minority-party candidate responded by saying that these are G-d’s children and therefore cannot be deported. No one reminded the senior senator from Arizona that by that logic all living creatures are G-d’s children. How can we ever go to war? Aren’t the enemy soldiers G-d’s children? How can we slaughter animals? Are they not also G-d’s children? And by the way, John, didn't G-d deport his first two children from the Garden of Eden? Did he not later deport his chosen people from the Promised Land? Can the media ask questions?
We have been in Iraq for more than eight years now. We have almost complete control of the country and all of its records. And yet the media has been unwilling and/or unable to ascertain and report how many people have died as a result of our invasion. The media has never to my knowledge even reported that they weren’t reporting it. So while we hear, as we should, exactly how many of our troops have died, we don’t hear that at least 50 to 150 times that many Iraqis have been killed during this period. The media just can’t figure out how to find this information out or even that it is important. Would you want to know that, let’s say, from 200,000 to 600,000, mainly civilian Iraqis, have been killed?
There are notable exceptions to the rule of poor reporting. The PBS News Hour (the Lehrer Report) goes into the major news in depth, trying to cover every angle. The BBC World News is also excellent and much more thorough than its American network counterparts.
What these good news shows prove is that good journalism is still possible. We don’t want fluff. We don’t want to see and hear the same big news story until we are numb but we insist on hearing the whole story with the necessary facts and figures on the rest of the news. We want to be treated like intelligent, well-educated adults. How can we learn and grow to make intelligent decisions if we cannot get news that actually teaches us about our world and its inhabitants?
If we want a strong fourth estate, we have to demand it.
But have they?
With a few exceptions, the members of the mainstream mass media have failed to live up to that legacy. In large part, the newspaper and television coverage of events is either shamelessly excessive or terribly shallow and incomplete.
When it comes to covering the big stories like severe hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, or earthquakes, the media reports from the scene, ad nauseam. The death figures change by the hour from being ridiculously small to being record-breaking. Every detail of the disaster is reviewed and repeated, incessantly. We are forced to see the worst of the tragedy until it saturates our consciousness. We are invited to look at as many ruined buildings and shattered lives as possible.
When 9/11 came into our lives we were shown footage of the crash not just dozens of times but hundreds or even thousands of times, as though picking at a wound.
Then here was the tsunami in Indonesia, the flooding in New Orleans, the terrible storms in the Midwest, the landing on the Hudson, and then the earthquake in Haiti. The media could not seem to spend enough time on these events. The anchors were obliged to leave the warmth of their studios to venture into these crises. Reporters informing us of killer weather must actually be in that weather to report on it even if they are falling down or can hardly see.
During these disasters, no other news occurs or, at least, is reported. There is no war overseas, no crime in the streets, no child lost or abandoned. There is just the one main story that is designed to reveal just how loving and compassionate we all are.
But then, for all other news on regular news days, the journalists can’t seem to get or share all the information necessary to tell the story.
Here are some cases in point.
The governor of New York at the time was accused of having an expensive night with a prostitute. Every day we heard about him and the prostitute and how much she charged to fly to give him service. What they did not report immediately or even weeks later was that this john was a regular customer for many years dating back to the days that he was the state’s attorney general. At that time he vigorously prosecuted the major houses of prostitution except for the one he frequented.
When reporting on economic news, the media neglects to connect all the dots. For the past few years, the country’s recession has caused a high unemployment rate. The current administration is trying to help by pumping money into the economy causing a large budget deficit. It has been two years now and the unemployment stands at just under 10%, twice as much as it should be. When this is discussed, it is rarely, if ever mentioned that when the last great recession occurred during the Reagan administration, Reagan tried for five years to reduce the unemployment rate he inherited from his predecessor. He lowered taxes for the rich and thereby incurred record deficits.
It took FDR nine years to end the depression after creating record deficits and finally needed World War II to get us back to “normal.”
Our President has been forced into a record budget deficit because of the disaster left him by the former administration. The deficit is now $13 trillion with Obama’s first year shortfall of more than $1 trillion. The right wing media is howling that we are at $13 trillion because of Obama. No one has mentioned that the $12 trillion deficit that Obama did not cause, came to us from Reagan and Bush, the Right’s heroes. The deficit actually decreased under Clinton, the Right’s villain.
The country suffers from serious immigration problems. Poor, unskilled, uneducated masses are coming into our country illegally. It is estimated that there are now 12-20 million document-free immigrants in this country, breaking laws and taking jobs away from Americans who really need the work. No one mentions that this problem got bad when Reagan gave those in the country illegally at that time amnesty and did not secure our borders. This gave tens of millions of poor Latin Americans hope that if they could get here illegally, get good paying work without having to pay income or payroll taxes, they too would eventually be handed keys to the Promised Land as did their countrymen before them.
During the Presidential campaign, the minority-party candidate made two strange, but unchallenged, statements. To this date I have not heard one media person point out the absurdity of the comments.
The first was a reaction to the opponent’s promise to eliminate tax cuts for the rich that were put in place by his predecessor on a temporary basis. The reclaimed taxes would be used the help fund needed services. The candidate from Arizona accused his Democratic rival of being in favor of using taxes for the redistribution of wealth. Not one person so far has reminded the senator that government exists to provide needed services by redistributing wealth. All taxation dating back to the Dark Ages has been collected for the redistribution of wealth, be it from the farmers to the rich nobles or from the taxpayer for the services needed by the population whether they be national defense or urban planning and development or welfare for the poor. I have not heard one media person ever point this out.
The second was regarding not deporting the many document-free immigrants currently in our country. The compassionate conservative minority-party candidate responded by saying that these are G-d’s children and therefore cannot be deported. No one reminded the senior senator from Arizona that by that logic all living creatures are G-d’s children. How can we ever go to war? Aren’t the enemy soldiers G-d’s children? How can we slaughter animals? Are they not also G-d’s children? And by the way, John, didn't G-d deport his first two children from the Garden of Eden? Did he not later deport his chosen people from the Promised Land? Can the media ask questions?
We have been in Iraq for more than eight years now. We have almost complete control of the country and all of its records. And yet the media has been unwilling and/or unable to ascertain and report how many people have died as a result of our invasion. The media has never to my knowledge even reported that they weren’t reporting it. So while we hear, as we should, exactly how many of our troops have died, we don’t hear that at least 50 to 150 times that many Iraqis have been killed during this period. The media just can’t figure out how to find this information out or even that it is important. Would you want to know that, let’s say, from 200,000 to 600,000, mainly civilian Iraqis, have been killed?
There are notable exceptions to the rule of poor reporting. The PBS News Hour (the Lehrer Report) goes into the major news in depth, trying to cover every angle. The BBC World News is also excellent and much more thorough than its American network counterparts.
What these good news shows prove is that good journalism is still possible. We don’t want fluff. We don’t want to see and hear the same big news story until we are numb but we insist on hearing the whole story with the necessary facts and figures on the rest of the news. We want to be treated like intelligent, well-educated adults. How can we learn and grow to make intelligent decisions if we cannot get news that actually teaches us about our world and its inhabitants?
If we want a strong fourth estate, we have to demand it.
The Oil Spill Symbolism
The Oil Spill Symbolism
What has been described as the greatest man-made disaster to ever hit this country showed no signs of abating after more than two months. The ruptured oil well located one mile below sea level had been leaking as many as 50,000 barrels (or 2.1 million gallons) a day of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico threatening sea life and all those depending on it for a livelihood. While all of its causes are still being investigated, the primary cause is clear - greed mixed with a good measure of arrogance. The greed made oil company decision-makers rush the job to minimize costs and maximize future profits. The arrogance made them believe that they did not need to take the time to do it right. They were blind to any possible environmental damage their corner cutting could cause.
Where have we heard this before?
The banking, real estate and automobile industries in this country have had their own systemic ruptures recently. In each case the decision makers were greedy as well as arrogant. The combination made them all blind to the problems they were creating. As with the oil spill, the problems in each industry continued unabated for a long time. First there was denial, then there was minimizing the problems, and then there was a problem too big to disguise or disregard. In each case there was the externality, the spill over effect, of these business catastrophes and there are always the innocent victims.
The banking disaster, caused in part by the real estate disaster, led to the loss of confidence in the financial system which led to reduced spending which led to reduced production which led to fewer jobs which exacerbated the loss of confidence and the vicious cycle continued like a snowball rolling down a steep incline. The bankers got greedy, they wanted ever bigger bonuses and took ever greater risks. They were arrogant because they thought that they could get away with anything, that if they failed the government would have to bail them out.
The politicians who received generous donations from Wall Street were greedy. They wanted more money to stay in power. They were greedy for power. So they acquiesced to Wall Street’s demands and eliminated restrictions set in place to prevent another Great Depression. They were arrogant enough to believe that by earning money to betray their constituents they were still worthy of their votes.
The realtors also got greedy. They must have known that some of their clients could not possibly afford the homes they were bidding on with nothing to put down for the purchase. Their arrogance was in their thinking that their bubble could never burst.
The home buyers who bought the homes that even they knew they could not afford were greedy for the American dream with all its trimmings but had not put the down payment in effort. Their arrogance was in believing that somehow they could get and keep something for nothing or at least for well under actual cost.
The corporate leaders of our car companies were also greedy. They wanted easy profits and so abandoned the small economical family car that the country needed and instead produced large truck-like SUVs which were inexpensive to build but could be sold for high prices because of their size. Never mind that they were gas guzzlers and took up too much space. The leaders of “the big three” were arrogant enough to think that the American consumer would buy whatever Detroit gave them. Their blindness led to the bankruptcy of two of our three major automakers and a multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout.
I believe that the Reagan tax cuts for the rich reducing the top tax bracket from 90% to 39%, unleashing a gush of suddenly rich and the suddenly terribly rich was a similar disaster. The rich built even bigger houses, bought even bigger cars, and developed bigger egos. They were ever greedy for more money and fewer taxes. They became increasingly arrogant and made risky investments that ended up almost destroying our economy.
The result of all this free-flowing greed mixed with arrogance polluted the nation’s economic waters from which our people are nourished.
The same thing happened in competitive sports - amateur and professional. Some athletes and their trainers got greedy for more success, better stats, higher salaries and bigger bonuses. They were arrogant enough to think that they could get away with using steroids to improve their strength and perseverance. As the violations seemed to piggy back on previous ones and more athletes took performance-enhancing drugs in more sports, more of the results became hard to believe. Whether it was Olympic sprinters, weightlifters or swimmers, long distance cyclists, or professional baseball pitchers and hitters, the sports officials couldn’t stop the abuses. And meanwhile whatever integrity these sports had enjoyed became polluted by the cheating bred from greed and arrogance.
Today our favorite religions seem to be unable to control their own destructive eruptions. The Catholic Church has been unable to stop the eruptions of charges of priestly abuses that are being reported all over the globe. When the truth is finally told, the sexual abuse of children by the clergy will probably be found to have occurred on every continent. After a while we will also learn that this rupture of hypocritical immorality dates back hundreds of years with many of these priests themselves having been innocent victims in their youth. It’s hard to imagine what kind of greed and arrogance motivated these outbursts except perhaps a greed or desperate hunger for physical affection mixed with the arrogance that they could get away with it because they were above Man’s laws. And how could their “superiors” think that they could just cover it up? Who knows how many of these “tolerant” bishops had themselves been molested as children?
Then there is the religion that is so much in the news for its violence in the Middle East. The religious leaders either cannot or will not stop the violence that in the last 10 years has prematurely ended the lives of more than a million of its own people. Thousands of its adherents are blowing themselves up and killing innocent people in the mistaken impression that they will not only escape their lives of suffering but also that they will be somehow rewarded for their greatest of sins. Perhaps the leaders of this religion are also greedy for more power and are arrogant enough to believe that inciting their flock to violence will somehow not get them eternal damnation.
And then there are columnists like this one who is greedy enough to want his country, his world free of all that pollutes it and he is arrogant enough to think that somehow by writing about these problems, he can make them disappear.
Let us hope that the damages of this tragic oil spill in the Gulf are easier to repair than the other effects greed and arrogance are having on our nation and its people.
What has been described as the greatest man-made disaster to ever hit this country showed no signs of abating after more than two months. The ruptured oil well located one mile below sea level had been leaking as many as 50,000 barrels (or 2.1 million gallons) a day of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico threatening sea life and all those depending on it for a livelihood. While all of its causes are still being investigated, the primary cause is clear - greed mixed with a good measure of arrogance. The greed made oil company decision-makers rush the job to minimize costs and maximize future profits. The arrogance made them believe that they did not need to take the time to do it right. They were blind to any possible environmental damage their corner cutting could cause.
Where have we heard this before?
The banking, real estate and automobile industries in this country have had their own systemic ruptures recently. In each case the decision makers were greedy as well as arrogant. The combination made them all blind to the problems they were creating. As with the oil spill, the problems in each industry continued unabated for a long time. First there was denial, then there was minimizing the problems, and then there was a problem too big to disguise or disregard. In each case there was the externality, the spill over effect, of these business catastrophes and there are always the innocent victims.
The banking disaster, caused in part by the real estate disaster, led to the loss of confidence in the financial system which led to reduced spending which led to reduced production which led to fewer jobs which exacerbated the loss of confidence and the vicious cycle continued like a snowball rolling down a steep incline. The bankers got greedy, they wanted ever bigger bonuses and took ever greater risks. They were arrogant because they thought that they could get away with anything, that if they failed the government would have to bail them out.
The politicians who received generous donations from Wall Street were greedy. They wanted more money to stay in power. They were greedy for power. So they acquiesced to Wall Street’s demands and eliminated restrictions set in place to prevent another Great Depression. They were arrogant enough to believe that by earning money to betray their constituents they were still worthy of their votes.
The realtors also got greedy. They must have known that some of their clients could not possibly afford the homes they were bidding on with nothing to put down for the purchase. Their arrogance was in their thinking that their bubble could never burst.
The home buyers who bought the homes that even they knew they could not afford were greedy for the American dream with all its trimmings but had not put the down payment in effort. Their arrogance was in believing that somehow they could get and keep something for nothing or at least for well under actual cost.
The corporate leaders of our car companies were also greedy. They wanted easy profits and so abandoned the small economical family car that the country needed and instead produced large truck-like SUVs which were inexpensive to build but could be sold for high prices because of their size. Never mind that they were gas guzzlers and took up too much space. The leaders of “the big three” were arrogant enough to think that the American consumer would buy whatever Detroit gave them. Their blindness led to the bankruptcy of two of our three major automakers and a multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout.
I believe that the Reagan tax cuts for the rich reducing the top tax bracket from 90% to 39%, unleashing a gush of suddenly rich and the suddenly terribly rich was a similar disaster. The rich built even bigger houses, bought even bigger cars, and developed bigger egos. They were ever greedy for more money and fewer taxes. They became increasingly arrogant and made risky investments that ended up almost destroying our economy.
The result of all this free-flowing greed mixed with arrogance polluted the nation’s economic waters from which our people are nourished.
The same thing happened in competitive sports - amateur and professional. Some athletes and their trainers got greedy for more success, better stats, higher salaries and bigger bonuses. They were arrogant enough to think that they could get away with using steroids to improve their strength and perseverance. As the violations seemed to piggy back on previous ones and more athletes took performance-enhancing drugs in more sports, more of the results became hard to believe. Whether it was Olympic sprinters, weightlifters or swimmers, long distance cyclists, or professional baseball pitchers and hitters, the sports officials couldn’t stop the abuses. And meanwhile whatever integrity these sports had enjoyed became polluted by the cheating bred from greed and arrogance.
Today our favorite religions seem to be unable to control their own destructive eruptions. The Catholic Church has been unable to stop the eruptions of charges of priestly abuses that are being reported all over the globe. When the truth is finally told, the sexual abuse of children by the clergy will probably be found to have occurred on every continent. After a while we will also learn that this rupture of hypocritical immorality dates back hundreds of years with many of these priests themselves having been innocent victims in their youth. It’s hard to imagine what kind of greed and arrogance motivated these outbursts except perhaps a greed or desperate hunger for physical affection mixed with the arrogance that they could get away with it because they were above Man’s laws. And how could their “superiors” think that they could just cover it up? Who knows how many of these “tolerant” bishops had themselves been molested as children?
Then there is the religion that is so much in the news for its violence in the Middle East. The religious leaders either cannot or will not stop the violence that in the last 10 years has prematurely ended the lives of more than a million of its own people. Thousands of its adherents are blowing themselves up and killing innocent people in the mistaken impression that they will not only escape their lives of suffering but also that they will be somehow rewarded for their greatest of sins. Perhaps the leaders of this religion are also greedy for more power and are arrogant enough to believe that inciting their flock to violence will somehow not get them eternal damnation.
And then there are columnists like this one who is greedy enough to want his country, his world free of all that pollutes it and he is arrogant enough to think that somehow by writing about these problems, he can make them disappear.
Let us hope that the damages of this tragic oil spill in the Gulf are easier to repair than the other effects greed and arrogance are having on our nation and its people.
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