An Artificial Crisis Is Not the Same As a Real One

Sorry, folks, but it's my belief
that as bad as it's been lately,
we were all but asking for it.

Every artificial economic boom,
which is to say all of them,
always ends the same way, in a
collapse.

So why are we so surprised
every time it happens?

Because the real artificial
catastrophe is the belief
that business can be run not on
good ideas or sound speculating,
but on the basis that you can
create progress without trying
to back it up in the real world.

That's it!

That's the real problem we continually face,
an undisciplined ambition to seek out
new fortunes and affect change simply
for the sake of fortune and change,
rather than any real need or ability
to properly channel it in real terms.

To say, "this has got to be done"
simply because that's the thought
that just popped in your head
is to ask for failure, a shell of
what you propose and the ghost of success
and then failure.

Didn't we nail Bush to the wall
because he thought he could claim
"success" in Iraq? Why can't we
make equations where they exist,
and not just when they're convenient?

(And besides, Bush claimed accomplishment
because he essentially did what his
father wouldn't, and despite what everyone
has said, he proved the mission true -
oh, and with some continued difficulty?
Who would have imagined that?!?)

Business is always a dicey proposition,
like being asked to kill your own
brother, or bring law to a savage land
you made that way and without backup,
living in a cave, making your own music.

I call today's reality the Dilbert Effect
because Scott Adams is the voice
that rang out first about all the absurdities
we somehow imagined were increasingly
necessary, a return to peculiar institutions
which also, regularly failed despite
their perceptions. We've moved beyond
them, and we only need to catch up,
the lag effect of the New Fade, if you will.

I'll credit Obama that he sees true reform
where true reform is needed, when pressed to it,
and maybe he's better than the hype that
got him where he is today, but I'm sick
of all the voices that say he's right
for the sake of being right, that those
who work the opposite aisle are automatically
wrong because they're being vanquished
(and really, where would that leave us?),
but we must learn to temper ourselves
in politics as in business, as in economics,
must discover a way to form a true democracy.

I find no real motivation in the form
of an artificial crisis, but rather
in the understanding that in working
together for a common cause rather
than out of fear, we all stand to benefit.

***

In the fight for the environment, I see
an unfortunate parallel. Really, tell me
how we can possibly destroy the entire world
all by ourselves and somehow completely fail
to adjust to new conditions, when that is all
our history has ever told us about ourselves.

We seem to regard ourselves as a Third World,
unable to rise above the stupor of our
own impoverished lives, or our own hobbled
ecosystem, if you are to believe strictly
in the reports that daily inundate us.

But I rather believe against the Third World Theory,
that if a people cannot sustain themselves,
it has less to do with what they can do for
themselves than what is continually denied them,
and that would be an ability and means to
strike back the forces of oppression, as our
history always reminds us, and as such,
there is no crippling blow we cannot overcome,
but rather a state of fear that says so, and
that we must believe it in those terms rather
than in those that state, as we already know,
that no action fails to produce an equal
and opposite reaction; that once done, something
cannot be undone or result in something else,
and to believe that is somehow something
that we have agreed to.

I have had enough of fear.

I believe that we cannot accept
the things we should not accept,
and that this alone is what should
and indeed has always sustained us,
and that only the voices that insist
it can't have ever truly been
the oppressors and doom of us all.

But we can rise above.

We can always rise above.

The New Fade is working in our favor,
giving us the chance we are giving
ourselves to rise above, to let slip
the inky cloaks we assumed for ourselves,
the burial shrouds we will leave behind
for generations to come, whom we
might not recognize but will still
be our kin, the remnants of our age
perhaps some apocalypse they will
struggle to understand, but nothing
that will prevent their being.

Time changes all, takes away all,
gives back all, it is ever shifting.

But we cannot accept that
an end is anything but a beginning.

We do not have to say constantly
that the sky is falling.

Already a new age slouches forth,
waiting to be born.