Quote of the Day

America has been blessed with the most extraordinary resources, talent, prosperity and power. Yet over the past 40 years, as a nation, we stopped even trying to be good, to be just, to be ethical, to be merciful. Such concepts went from the elements of a moral spine to the quaint platitudes of a discarded righteousness. Who can name one domestic or international policy – backed, as policies are, by the tremendous force of American wealth and power – where the dominant political conversation had anything to do with words such as those? Our collective behavior toward children, the poor, the planet, one another and other people around the world has been and remains so devoid of any sense of moral responsibility that we have landed on a trajectory of chaos that could hardly have led us anywhere other than where we are now.

We were unprepared for this moment because we did nothing to avoid it. We have been so drunk on the pleasures of the material world, so sold on an amoral view of economics and social policy, and so worshipful of the false god of short-term profit. Our entire economic system has been based not on loving one another but on exploiting one another, and not on stewarding the Earth but on raping it, all for the most rapacious goal of extracting whatever money we could. And there, in our collective iniquity, lies the root of our problems, as well as the beginning of their solution, should we have the courage to face it.

As a nation, we have slithered like snakes across the floor to whatever hole where money lay, sacrificing the depths of our own humanity as we did so. And we are surprised now at the various crises among us? What should surprise us is that this didn't happen sooner. Just as the face of a fascistic president could have belonged to anyone, so the consequences of our spiritual malfeasance could have come in any form.

– Marianne Williamson
Excerpted from “America's Karma”
September 4, 2020

Related Off-site Links:
How Big Money Corrupts Our Politics (and How to Fix It) – Robert Reich (Salon, September 5, 2020).
Many GOP Voters Value America’s Whiteness More Than Its Democracy – Eric Levitz (New York Magazine, September 2, 2020).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Phillip Clark on the "Karmic Wake Up Call" of 2016
• “We Have an Emergency On Our Hands”: Marianne Williamson On the “Freefall” of American Democracy
• The “Freefall” Continues
• Fascism Is Upon Us
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 2, 2020
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – November 5, 2018

Image: Kristen Solberg.