I've always suspected...

one of the most dangerous words that manifests in our matrix as a threat to our very way of life within that matrix (or as we are now beginning to refer to it in past tense, "life as we knew it") is the word profit. Here, in this four minute commentary, Bill Maher shares a couple of examples why:

"The problem with president O'Bama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. " (B. Maher)

(A 'tip of the hat' to 'xandtrek' for this one.)

In my senior high school English lit class, I discovered John Steinbeck. I still remember how. I was searching for the shortest, quickest read I could possibly find from our instructor's required reading list of novels. In a deserted library row of overstocked, under-read shelves of fiction, I discovered a lone copy of Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I never expected to enjoy it. But I fell in love with its characters of societal misfits and the message conveyed through them which has affected me ever since in ways I'm sure I can't imagine or even know.

As described in an anonymously written paper entitled The "Failure" As Hero in Cannery Row, "where both human freedom and human virtue are obsolete, the result is itself an absurdity."

I think, as the Maher video points out, that is the world we have inherited. Absurdity is the world in which we are living. A world where money and its greedy pursuit thereof is most often the motivation driving the economy and nation toward an increasingly more dangerous future. A world that, through our own indifference or impotent reaction to where we are being led, seemingly embraces its own absurd demise.

It's a world we richly deserve. A world we just may get? Maybe for Christmas!