Thursday, 20 October 2011

• Occupy Wall Street and the Love of Money

  I'm reading so much about money.

  #OccupyWallStreet has been flooding the news sources--all about how this group of people is invading and camping in Wall Street as a protest against the banking corporations that are controlling the country. To add to that, other groups has come up as well like the 52% and the 47% groups, all proving how hard-working they have been throughout life. It's a lot of strife and fierceness which I cannot handle more often than not. My peaceful style of living or probably better termed--ignorance--quickly proves to be my refuge in these times. 

  It become more personal and meaningful to me when I realise that the protest has sparked many other demonstrations in other parts of the world. Not only that even a small gathering in New Zealand has come together to fight against the greed of this world (Link). New Zealand of all places, where the grass is green and pure--corruption reaches even our shores like the cargo of the dying ship Rena.

  It's saddening to me. It's tragic to me.

  What is tragic is not so much the corruption and the greed, but the whole grip that money has on us. 

  The grip is so great that even we are fighting over what is paper and cannot last long in this world. The problem is not the people on Wall Street, the problem is our obsession with material possessions. The problem is the belief that we can ever be contented with money and the things which it can buy. Underlying all of this, underlying all gender workplace politics, is that people want money, and they would fight with their lives for it. I saw an interesting representation of how much money the U.S. government is owing here and it's a ridiculous amount I might say.

  Injustice is not manifested in not getting as much money as you deserve, we deserve nothing. We are born in this world with nothing, and we leave with nothing. We work with the expectation of a fair wage, but nothing is deserved. Everything is privilege. Everything is a construct of our human world, and everything we live for is a shadow of a resemblance of the Kingdom. We live in a dark world that is trying to shine a light, and what light is there to be found in shadows? What hope is there to be found in a hopeless system created by man?

  I posted a extract on tumblr from the video game Half Life 2 today, spoken by Doctor Wallace Breen.  He is trying to convince Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of the story, that his rebellion against the oppressive Combines is wrong. When Gordon Freeman kills the overlord of the attacking Combines, Gordon unwittingly widens the dimensional rift, which leads to disasters on Earth. Breen is convincing that Freeman should come back and believe that the "Combine" that has taken over mankind is good. Within his rhetoric, he says:

  “Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon’s worth of mud?”

  There is a certain truth in what he says--is what the accomplishments of human kind going to be just broken plastic shards, hatred that we cannot force to decompose and fade away. The money of this world, there will never be enough to satisfy us. People will search for what is left of our society in the ruins of Babylon, and what they will find is not money, but bloodshed and memories which we cannot forget. Plastics which have been left behind in our own laziness to live apart from this world.

  "Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”" Hebrews 13:5 (English Standard Version)

  Is this everything that we will have fought for? What is the real issue that we should be fighting for?
  

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