Crazy
and Desperate
“Feeling
lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”
Alain
de Botton
I
know so many people these days—smart, well-educated people,
hard-working people—who face the end of every month desperate about
where the money will come from to pay their bills. It's a conundrum
we in the Western world haven't faced since the great depression.
Young people, college graduates, cannot find jobs that will support
them. They end up living with parents, delaying marriage and
child-rearing, until they have some kind of ever-more-distant
security. And, not just young people. Folks in their so-called
“golden years” hauling the coin jar to Wal-Mart to buy a few more
days worth of groceries. In the meantime, rents and food prices are
skyrocketing. A friend told me his son in the Oakland, CA area pays
$2,000.00 per month for a one-bedroom apartment—more than half his
income.
Desperation
makes people do strange things. It's enough to drive some of us
support a presidential candidate who talks of building a two-thousand
mile long wall on our southern border, as though that would be the
solution to all our problems. Anything, they say, that will change
the status quo. Desperation also fuels outrageous accusations. We
tell ourselves we shouldn't be in this situation, that someone else
is to blame, that our government has betrayed us, and so on. Rarely
do we look at the toll on our treasury that fifteen continuous years
of war has taken. The money that could have been spent on schools and
roads, research and bridges, upgrading our power grid and our
out-dated technology, and a million other beneficial and worthy
projects is going into an endless war machine, and subsequent efforts
to rehabilitate the thousands of men and women crippled in body and
soul by that fruitless crusade.
Sometimes,
people of privilege could bring about the greatest change by changing
their own ideas of “how things ought to be.” Feeling crazy and
desperate can be a productive, inventive part of life. After all, it
is no one's birth-right to live on easy street for all time. Perhaps
we could just take a deep breath, and ask ourselves why we feel we
deserve to have everything our way forever. Maybe the good life
includes lost, crazy and desperate. Maybe it's someone else's turn to
experience optimism, certainty and success.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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