David Mastromatteo
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

The challenges and flaws facing the world as of now are myriad and deeply ingrained in greed and the illusions of power and prosperity. Solutions are grounds for argument rather than clear vision to push towards. There are no definite culprits, and so everything needs to be considered, and since every voice should matter and very few are willing to (or should have to) do that amount of work, the problems hold what actual power there is.

Greed is an easy target, and perhaps the most obvious one, a greed and corruption which should have been curbed by the Great Depression but wasn’t (because who pulled out of the Depression intact? Those with enough money who now saw how to keep it and how important it could be), or exposed by the most recent manufactured Recession but people either failed to notice or refused to act. When the public panics about money, falsely inspired or no, they fail to pay attention to much else, performing their jobs not out of joy but out of fear of losing it, watching for financial news rather than focusing on the politics which caused their panic, because when one’s present is consumed by money, why should the past matter? What use is thinking about ten steps ahead when the ones underfoot are uncertain? The cruelest act of greed committed by this version of the free market is that now, no one is comfortable. Middle class families have two earners because otherwise they cannot afford the lifestyle they ought to be seen as having, and the additional stresses placed upon such families keep them under constant strain. The exceptionally poor work three or more jobs each because otherwise they cannot afford to survive, the pressures here being obvious. With prices being what they unnecessarily are, the unchecked harshness of the insurance and legal industry, and the devout refusal of any other industry to increase pay at a commeasurate rate, so many parts of the industrialized world have become ports of, if not panic, constant concern. Nothing in the world right now needs to cost as much as it does, and the main reason it does is because someone is getting rich off the process somewhere, and almost always someone who is not connected to either supply or consumption. No one who works in the world right now needs to feel as afraid as they do, regardless of the idea of means. The working class, which I believe in this world includes the middle class, are denied the opportunity to live within their means, right from the start. Again, to me, this is sure enough evidence that the Great Experiment of the free market has failed.

Greed alone is not the fault, of course, but it has forced so many of us to have the blinders on, to be put in mazes and races we did not choose to, all for the sake an abstract idea of more wealth, along all lines of life. All thoughts have at least two sides; take for example, this, whose main idea is often attributed to Medgar Evers but most certainly predates all quotations. 'You may kill a few individuals, but you cannot kill an idea. An idea is immortal. In the midst of tempests an idea attains the stature of a giant, and like a diamond shines with new light at every repercussion.' -Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, the Dublin Review, 1845. Like a diamond in the present, this light is being jealously and selfishly guarded, used to blind and control anyone who doesn’t already have a hand to it. On the other side, so many of the ideals of the modern world still exist, and need to, and perhaps this present is just another tempest to be endured.

David Mastromatteo

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What we need most, now, is people embracing not only intelligence but each other.