Friday, December 4, 2009

The Roaring Twenties and Now

Last year's financial collapse and its continuing fallout in the form of extravagant management salaries, gouging interest rates on bankcards, insurance companies working overtime to keep from having to honor their commitments and the powerlessness of the middle class to do anything about it are all signs of decline. What happens to a society when large numbers of its citizens worship power politics and glorify greed? Even the churces are doing it. Afterall, isn't that what mega-churches are all about? Isn't that what the C Street Church in Washington D.C. is all about? Also, we hear religious people justifying torture and turning a deaf ear to the economic plight of the poor and the middle class; it all seems beyond belief. But that is the era in which we live.

The roaring Twenties, which the movie, Caberet, uses to illustrate Berlin's decadence shoud serve as a warning to us. We are out of balance and lets hope we make some changes so as not to duplicate Germany's descent into hell. It is not a mistake that greed is one of the traditional seven deadly sins. And real politic practiced on a wide scale will rip a society apart. The good news is that Germany survived and rebuilt itself. We can do the same and hopefully we will not have to descend as far as they did.

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