Thirsty in the Rain

One of my favorite Peter Rowan songs is "Thirsty in the Rain" which says "in green valleys lonesome people trying so hard to tell each other what they think they know, with greedy hands they take each others money just to buy back each others pain, in this land of flowing milk and honey they wander thirsty in the rain"

Don't wander thirsty in the rain.

Some of Garrision Keilors thoughts about the current situation offer some clarity, he sees it like it is.

"What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn't funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how Mr. McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.

Mr. McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy's window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for awhile and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on. A few true conservatives are leading a charge against the bailout. Good for them. But how about admitting that their cowboy economic philosophy was at fault here? "

And a few of my not so eloquent thoughts:

Being relatively poor has allowed me to obtain very little knowledge of the workings of the economy and the intricate financial markets that our global economy operates on. So like most Americans I am trying to figure out what this whole economic meltdown even means. It seems to me that we are seeing the worst that a capitalist system has to offer. Capitalism essentially gives people (and corporations) the incentive to think of themselves and their profits, period. There is no incentive to look out for others or to even care about what is happening to anyone else. It all hinges on how much you can get, accumulate and hoard. Why does a person even need a billion dollars? What would you do with it?

It also seems to me, as easy as it is to blame government deregulation and lack of over site (ala the Free Market Republicans) or corporate greed, we seem to miss the third party in all of this, us, the people, society. Our society, made up of millions of individuals, has not lived within their means. We have become so materialistic, so bent on accumulating things that we have lost sight of reality. Seems that this economic crisis is simply a symptom of a much larger societal problem, the fact that our whole way of living is based on the consumption of things. Maybe this crisis will force us to reevaluate our love of material things and to remember that simple is better.