Some fundamental questions

What passes for news these days—in the papers or on television¸ radio, or the internet—is unsettling. Among the worst are frequent stories about the government, abetted by large private organizations, overturning environmental and health regulations, about leaders who doubt that we are facing the existential threat of human-caused climate change, and about an increasingly manic pursuit of wealth throughout society irrespective of the collateral social damage.

Although I have fundamental disagreements with the nature of this country’s fixation on getting and spending, I am increasingly disturbed by what I see as a headlong attempt to plunder the planet in the name of profit and to support that plunder by a visceral militarism that ravages the treasury and bruises our collective soul with a vacuous unquestioned patriotism. I wonder what madness has beset us.

Too often our leaders and those who support them ignore the human cost of their actions, whether it be soldiers injured or killed in some questionable military venture or ordinary people sickened or hurt by policies based on profit rather than the welfare of the commonweal.

The writer Wendell Berry has born witness for decades against the powerful who believe that profit is more important than people. Here is a poem by him that is an eloquent call to conscience.

Questionnaire

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.