The Mean Reds and The Mad Monk
 
 
At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney I'm going to start with a question: Have you ever noticed how rude and nasty and ill-tempered everyone is today? We have become a nation of smart alecs and grouches it would appear, people rushing about, too busy with just trying to make ends meet to worry about being polite; people just trying to survive in a world turned mean-spirited and dominated by greed; people tired and mad...and scared. One of my favourite fictional characters, Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, summed it up rather nicely when she talked about the "Mean Reds". When confronted with the sour face of our ever-more-terrifying world, I often think of the late and lovely Audrey Hepburn, who played Holly in the film version of Truman's story. In the film she talks about how " The Blues are because you're getting fat or because it's raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The Mean Reds are horrible. Suddenly you're scared, and you don't know what of". The Mean Reds. Our world today is awash in the Mean Reds.
 
How can we really expect anything different? The rich are indeed getting richer while the poor get poorer. The top 5 percent of the richest Americans control upwards of 60% of all the wealth. Over 47 million Americans simply can't afford health insurance, and this in the richest country in the world. Granted, all of our corporate CEOs, bankers, lawyers, doctors, Wall Street brokers, athletes, and Hollywood entertainers never have to worry about having adequate healthcare. Nor does it salve the wounds of those struggling to keep their heads above water that hundreds of billions have been handed over to the usurers (bankers), while the credit card reform bill will not go anywhere NEAR far enough in reigning in these vampires who have cheated and deceived the American people into roughly 900 BILLION in debt to them.
 
And then we face issues like Corporate Welfare, a nasty business where the United States government hands out upwards of 150 Billion Dollars and more a year to the corporations in the form of subsidies and tax breaks. Well, we have to "stay competitive in the world market" we're told. Once again, somehow I don't think that seems to be of comfort to those living below or near the poverty line, or those who lose jobs that are moved to Third World countries by the same corporations, in some cases, that receive these government handouts for advertising overseas, or buying factory space in other countries, or putting on fireworks displays or building golf courses. Well, golf IS important to the hardworking corporate exec, and they do deserve SOME recreation, bless their hearts (did you catch the sarcasm there?). Funny how people get up in arms about "welfare cheats", and have no idea that the biggest cheats of all wear pin-striped suits and enjoy three martini lunches.
 
We have found ourselves lost and wandering in not one war but two. The first, a horrid miscalculation, and one which has resulted in a further destabilization of the Middle East, not to mention a huge increase in the unpopularity of the U.S. and its highly questionable motives. The very fire of terrorism we hoped to dowse has been fed a gallon of gasoline instead, and all because the rush to hand out hundreds of billions in defense contracts drowned out the voices of reason which insisted that this was the worst way to deal with Islamic fundamentalism. The second war, even more potentially devastating, is a war for the very soul of a nation, and fought between those who believe in fairness and equality, and those who have married their Faith with a worship of Mammon (greed) and pseudo-patriotism, who are all but silent regarding usury or the care given to our poor and sick, but are the first in line to go goofy wild at the very mention of gay marriage (the banning of which, by the way, is actually unconstitutional... but hey, we're livin' in the good ole USA).
 
Is it any wonder then that so many of us who the wealthy feed upon are scared and confused? Gas prices soared last year, while several of the oil companies have had their best years ever, and while Americans get themselves so very worked up over Universal Healthcare (a very basic decency that only Ebenezer Scrooge himself or someone as wicked as he would question)  or desecrating the flag, the issue of just how UNEQUAL a nation we have become seems not to be of any great interest to most of our politicians. We hear almost daily the vociferous assertions by our people in Washington of just how committed to their God they are, and yet, though many of them identify as People of Faith, they seem to have either forgotten or ignored some fairly clear directives left to us by Moses and The Prophets, Yeshua/Jesus of Nazareth, and The Buddha, among others. Jesus said, "As you have done for the least of these, so you have done for me". Take care of the poor, the sick, visit those lonely and in prison, do not hoard wealth....well, that last one is one they REALLY seem to have forgotten, despite Jesus' insistance that "it is easier for a camel to travel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven" or His equally chilling indictment "woe to the rich, for they already have their reward". I suppose Jesus, like the poor and the struggling, is easily enough swept under the rug, replaced by a special "edited" version compatible with "good capitalism".
 
And so we go about our daily lives, grouchy, and sarcastic, and scared. The Mean Reds. There is a skeletal figure at the door, and we don't quite know his name, but we've seen his face. It is the face that Charles Dickens might have described as a "grasping, covetous old sinner", a face filled with razor sharp teeth, ready to rip into the carcass of the less affluent, the less privileged, the less powerful. The Mean Reds is actually Poe's Red Death renamed by Capote's lost, scared little socialite. It is the face of a plague, evil and uncaring and satanic, that would wipe out legions in the quest to make the rich richer. God have mercy on us.
 
Brother Damien, monastic