If I’m not mistaken – and if I am then I should be mistaken about much that I hold to be true – the most essential entity within an economy is the individual.  The individual is always valuable, a creator, an end unto itself – by which the means that move are merely everything in between that derives its value from its relation to the individual or, by extension, to society.  You are ostensibly one of these individuals.

Based on this assumption (and that government is the manifestation of the will of society, the collective will of individuals), why is it that the people, the individuals, are the ones who lose, time after time, to entities that are ultimately worthless, secondary creations that affect an individual’s value when, in dejection or disgrace, he devalues himself?

That when these creations fail in their stated responsibilities so badly, especially under a vast shadow of bad faith, and ravish the essential entities of the economy – of which they are dependent and from which derive power and profit – why are they the beneficiaries of our governmental grace, which is supposed to be oriented towards the welfare of the people, not to their impoverishment?

The news has been a consistent stream of reportage on crises in which the ones that benefit – win – from the actions of government (of the people, by the people, for the people) are not the people, but these macroentities which have been demonstrated empirically to be detrimental to the quality of life of not only the people, the supposed beneficiaries, but also to the environmental economy upon which all of our life is ultimately based?  Why is it that when the people and the government of this nation were attacked, the beneficiaries were corporations and their subsidiaries*?  Why is it that when the institutions* we have created (to enable trade amongst ourselves) defraud, bankrupt, and foreclose upon every avenue of good faith we had entrusted in them, why is it that the individuals must suffer and beg for the mercy they are due, but do not receive?

Look no further than what is right in front of you.  Change is not what you thought it was because you assumed that you are worth something.  Well, you are not, but if you want, you can be proud that your creations have grown up so big and strong.  Can it be any clearer from the evincing example of health system “reform” and its priorities that you and I are indeed worthless?  We will not get to the top, both you and I, not at the same time; maybe you, maybe me, but one of us has to wait our turn.  We all pay the tolls as we go – up and up, so slowly, all the way up to see the saints.  They’re so much smarter than you and I, up there; they’ve seen the top – they know how it is and how it should be, so they charge you a toll for the structure, a flat fee (beware! beware the hidden fees and artificially-inflated fees, and maintenance fees…) and that is great for them because we have to go up – but on the way, all you’re worth is what you pay (they get you on the way down, too).

The actors at the top want to make sure they’re holding onto the roof before the ladder goes down (as they know it will, just as surely as they know that someday they’ll be in the ground); just below, the junior actors – waiting bright-faced in the sun, impatiently smiling at the sky knowing that they are so close to that pie (and might even taste it!); and below them, in the middle, the ones who trust that the line will keep moving and that when we get to the top, we will all be standing on a floor instead of roof; and yet still below, the ones who cannot see the top at all but for a shadow in a halo against the wide-open sky, clamoring to know what it is they’re doing on the ladder in the first place, wild-eyed believers in the stories that fart their way down from the asses above; and at last, the ones who did not hold on, the ones who let go, the ones who fell off, lying on the street patiently smiling at the sky, to which that long chain of humanity ascending the ladder will never reach.

***

When do we win?  We have been handed loss after loss in this period of profit; the winnings are distilled from the sweat of toil, the tears of sorrow, and sold back to us as good spirits for a price we must pay, regardless of faith.  Look, listen: see that the bread is taken from those who labor and suffer (can you hear them creak and snap like tired old boughs? or do they shiver obeisances like saplings?).  What you cannot see or hear is that same bread rotting in the guts of those who have eaten what was taken unjustly from the earnest hand.  But you can sure smell the shit.

Who can sleep in such a world?

Do you question your faith when you’ve suffered blow after blow, or is it only another that you can see falling, for your fall occurs more slowly?  Have you been born into so much injustice that you have faith no more, or perhaps you subscribe to the Tao of the blind?

This is no game, this is no show – yet time after time, what they take is slowly sown in the soil beneath our heeled hooves, so that finally, when our feet are without their soles, we will see, understanding what devastation was wrought beneath the weeds when we dig our toes into the dead ground, and find that the seeds of our will no longer grow.

How does it feel to lose and lose and lose what cannot ever be taken, but what we insist on giving away?  Are you faithless or just trying to save face — either way, your blood is nothing but grease.  Don’t you know it is more?  Don’t you know your worth?

Take up the knife and murder your darlings, but be not satisfied watching so much blood pour from your creations – that blood is your own; it is your fathers’; it is your mothers’.  Turn to your brothers and your sisters and say, “I will give blood to the dead no more; I take only from blood what is already mine, as surely as God will take it back from me when I die — It is my life.”

Why do we insist on giving it away to anything less than God?  Why struggle in the cold, dead hands of our own creation?

If you know winning is impossible, do you believe we can win?

***

It is ridiculous to feel the need to say that I don’t mean stab your children in the middle of the night and watch them bleed to death.  I meant those precious beings we’ve created that threaten the integrity of our place in the Creation.  Flashes of genius that bleach the retina blind, only the negative image left behind.  But, really, our collective ability to deduce and infer these things from poetic rhetoric is as atrocious as it is absurd.  So much for good faith…

Oh, and By God!  God has no beard, doesn’t require forced conversion, and doesn’t heed my appeals for a Stanley Cup.  It’s all up to you, Lunchbox.

*(A dense qualification: “Corporations and their subsidiaries” & “institutions” includes those individuals who operate primarily within the parameters of these organizations and only secondarily within the society [of the general welfare], and are afforded a class to themselves with different rules and information in an artificial society with its own monetary considerations, secrecy clauses, and lack of or immunity from legal/ethical/professional accountability in society at large….  [I think actor best describes such a person more aptly than individual - those pretending to share human allegiances, but are nonetheless dependent upon their own artifice.])