It has been said that monkeys do what monkeys see. Impressionable minors will readily ape and mimic what they see their elders are doing, no matter how wanton or shameless. They are ‘inspired,’ swayed, and persuaded by media influencers, spin doctors, handlers, and enablers to discard their rags of poverty and claw their way upward to opulence, profligacy, and extravagance by any means foul or filthy. As children and the youth observe what is happening in our present chaotic politics and anarchic government, what will be their takeaways, their coming-of-age realizations? What have the recent indecent disclosures at congressional hearings on corruption involving flood-control projects etched into their mindset, their values and their overall sense of right and wrong-of good and evil?
The unchecked and unabated wholesale and widespread pilferage of public funds enables corrupt politicians and public officials, contractors, and their cohorts to bankroll the lavish, orgiastic, and bacchanalian lifestyles of their families, nepo babies, wives, and mistresses, at the expense of the hoi polloi, whom they’ve relegated to wallowing in toxic floodwaters and grinding, unmitigated poverty.
The root cause of our nation’s woebegone predicament is greed, the very bedrock of all other deadly sins. Pride is greed for self-aggrandizement and self-gratification. Envy is the covetous desire to have what others have. Lust is greed for self-love and self-abuse, gluttony the illicit craving for food beyond what is needed and necessary, and sloth the inordinate desire to acquire things without having to work for them, to make easy money by way of graft and corruption.
Corruption in our country has become the norm, the standard, the very lifeblood of this blighted and blasted land. Are we now to accept the epithet Ferdinand Magellan gave the Marianas Islands in 1521-Islas Ladrones, Islands of Thieves? Our so-called ‘public servants’ serve themselves, in grand manner and style, all that is due to the people who put them where they are now. As soon as they are installed in positions of power, these alleged ‘honorable ladies and gentlemen’ get right down to the monkey business of enriching themselves-the end goal of which is to remain forever wealthy and powerful.
The tragic fates that befell Henry Puyi, the last emperor of the last dynasty of China, as well as that of Nicholas II, last in the long line of Romanov czars of Russia, should serve as object lessons on the utter futility and meaninglessness of lives not lived and dedicated to the service of God, country, and neighbor. It is not okay to not be legally, ethically, and morally okay. It’s wrong to live by the credo that the end justifies the means, no matter how dishonest and dishonorable these may be. For the result to come out good, the beginning must be well-intentioned.
Fame and fortune, youth and beauty, rank and title, power and authority-you may not bring these with you to heaven or to hell when you die, and all bar none will be burned alongside your corpse at your funeral pure. What’s important, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Little Prince’ was wont to remind us, are the things that are invisible to the eyes but essential, unseen, yet substantive. The things that really matter-empathy, caring for others, love, and compassion-create a ripple that comes back to you, raising the tide in you and elevating you. Since you cannot take anything material with you when you go, you might as well lighten your load and share some of what you have plenty of while you can.
We should teach our children to live simply and frugally, to follow the straight and narrow path, to be clear of mind and clean of heart, and to counter all evil acts by doing good deeds.