Closing The Divide, 8

Home-owners with their precious house equity have a lot to answer for, you know. This insistence on holding out for the highest bidder is nothing but pure and unadulterated greed perpetrated by individuals who really care not a straw for the collective wellbeing and only concern themselves with their own entitlement and aggrandizement of wealth. I think that it is way too easy and simplistic to write this off as basic human greed and basic human nature. It does say a lot about our values, or our values vacuum in our society and the way that people grow and are nurtured into selfish and blinkered adults whose one goal in life seems to be to accrue wealth and to consume. How did we get here? Well, lots of theories have been proffered and I think they all have merit. When religion was disembowelled and eviscerated as a uniting and influential force for the common good, I think that we also cheated ourselves and our descendants of the benefits of religion as well as its liabilities. First, to set the record straight, I am completely in favour of both secularism and the separation of church and state. I remember the daily Bible reading and recital of the Lord's prayer from my early years in elementary school, and believe me, gentle Reader, it did not work. The Lord's Prayer made absolutely no sense to my six year old brain. My father didn't live in heaven. He lived in my house. Hallowed be thy name suggested Halloween, and I could not possibly make sense of a God, who was my dad, and whose name was about witches, Jack O Lanterns, and trick or treat. Thy Kingdom Come. Huh? Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, did sort of make sense, but I didn't have a clue what heaven was, or where. Give us this day our daily bread? Well, how about roast beef, chicken and potatoes and eggs and peanut butter and lots of chocolate ice cream, too? Forgive us for trespassing on the front lawn next door on the way home from school? And the Bible readings, rendered in Seventeenth Century English being read in the indifferent monotone of an already overworked and overwhelmed teacher? What were they thinking. Or, to add a little exclamation and question mark: What! Were they thinking? The churches have really lost their power and influence in people's lives and largely through their own fault and negligence, but I'll leave the details of that little rant for a future blogpost. What we have now in our post-Christian life is a kind of values deficit or vacuum. Yes, there is a growing emphasis on human rights and gender equality and antidiscrimination and diversity and so and so forth, and this is all for the greater part something very good. But is it enough? When there is no unifying spiritually-principled force in people's lives outside of pursuing their own personal happiness and inner peace, what at the end of the day, can really bring us all together? Now, Gentle Reader, before you get into a panic, please rest assured that I am not advocating a return to compulsory, nor compulsive religious observance. I don't even go to church on Sundays and I am an observant Christian. What I am saying is that we have not yet found a substitute for the old Christian consensus that can really motivate us into really taking care of one another, nor of doing much for the public good. On the other hand, racism and homophobia and discrimination against people with disabilities is no longer publicly tolerated, so there are some trade-offs, eh? We live now, like it or not, in a consumerist, shallow and very selfish environment and this is one reason why we have such tragedy as those venal and greedy home owners who through their selfish disregard of the common good are hell-bent on only selling their precious houses to the highest bidders, thus further pushing up housing costs, making this city all the more unaffordable and unlivable and thus doing their own part through their blind and stupid greed to further widen the gulf between rich and poor, further making our city an unfriendly and hostile place for all but the very wealthy. (Pardon the run-on sentence Gentle Reader, but I am indeed on a roll today!) this is to say, that the majority of veteran home-owners, being Baby Boomers, also lay claim to one of the most self-centred, narcissistic and acquisitive generations to have ever existed in our sorry human history. Yes, they have freed themselves from religion, but instead of preserving their ethical and moral moorings have opted instead to live in an ethical and philosophical vacuum, fostered and enabled by the most insidious and lethal influences of American pop and consumerist culture. So, this is what has created the mind-set of your average house owner, and while I'm sure that not all of them are moral and ethical basket cases, there are enough of them around to go on creating some very major problems and headaches for the future. Persuading moral midgets such as home-owners rich I equity but absolutely soul-poor is not going to be easy, and in some cases, downright impossible. There is one possible measure that can be taken, but it is going to be for the long term and it is going to take an awfully long time to implement. This has to do with revamping and restructuring our education systems to make moral and ethical education the very heart and soul of our children's development. I will explore this theme further tomorrow.