“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes… There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.”
Andrew Jackson, Veto Message of the Second Central Bank of the United States
As soon as wealth came to be a mark of distinction and an easy way to renown, military commands, and political power, virtue began to decline. Poverty was now looked on as a disgrace and blameless life as a sign of ill nature. Riches made the younger generation a prey to luxury, avarice, and pride. Squandering with one hand what they grabbed with the other, they set small value on their own property while the coveted that of others. Honor and modesty, all laws human and divine, were alike disregarded in a spirit of recklessness and intemperance.
When the truth gets buried deep
Beneath a thousand years of sleep
Time demands a turn-around
And once again the truth is found
— George Harrison
Now since the sea’s great surges sweep me on,
All canvas spread, hear me! In all creation
Nothing endures, all is in endless flux
Each wandering shape a pilgrim passing by
And time itself glides on in ceaseless flow,
A rolling stream–and streams can never stay,
Nor lightfoot hours. As wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies and follows,
Always, for ever new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed.
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. – John Kenneth Galbraith
Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws. The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of silence
She lived by the beach. It doesn’t matter which one. She waited every day for the perfect wave to take her away. It doesn’t matter where. But every day she went to the shore and looked far out along the waves. She waited for the perfect one.
And the house was never really clean. And the meals were never really good. In her estimation, she was tied to the wave. And so everything was a failure because the wave wouldn’t come. Everything was waiting. Every atom of her being was waiting. And she hated waiting.
One day, after so many years she lost count, she bought a ticket and boarded a ship for somewhere else. And then the tsunami came. And she lived or died or had other adventures—that part doesn’t matter. The question is, was she wasting all that time waiting when she could have been long gone? Or was the tsunami the Perfect Wave she was secretly waiting for all along?
