While You Were Gone: Ayn Rand Shrugged!
October 4th, 2008 by Pastor John
As my two younger sons, Marke and Matt, return from three weeks in youth hostels in London, Paris, Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Rome, and other cities along the way, I’m contemplating what to tell them about the last three weeks and how America is an ever-so-slightly different country than when they left. It wasn’t an attack or a natural catastrophe but we were shaken by an unexpected reality check of the most subtle variety.
Will it really effect their lives that the two largest mortgage companies in America were purchased by the Government? Is it going to matter much that a bank was allowed to fail and disolve in bankruptcy (Lehman Bros). And what have they heard while in Europe about their own bank WaMu and how it was seized by the Feds? Nor were they here when the largest single-day loss of wealth in the world’s history occurred ($1.2 trillion). What was really lost over the last three weeks?
An ideal, a dream, a way of looking at government and society which factors in the suspicion of man’s greed and ability mess things up, that’s what was lost. A trust that checks-and-balances would keep integrity at least possible. How ironic, that Marke and Matt, both University grads were in France when the US government stepped through the barrier of free-enterprise capitalism and became more like France than any of us are comfortable with. Adam Smith truly “passed away” in the last three weeks along with any hope of laissez-faire anything.
What will the bright American minds of the future pick up and read as they charge through their education process and on to their promising careers? For the last thirty years, I’ve enjoyed seeing fresh, young, thinking adults introduced to the radical ideas of Ayn Rand in ”Atlas Shrugged.” In fact, there is a well-used copy of “Atlas Shrugged” under Matt’s bed, which I noticed when feeding Gyro (his Geckco) last week. You might as well sell it at a garage sale, Matt, because she truly passed away last week also, though she’s been dead for decades.
America’s self-sense of its place in the world has changed in the last three weeks. We are no longer debating whether the recession has passed, is coming, or never was. Now we’re looking into the teeth of a coming recession, hoping to ward off a full-scaled depression. We’ve been warned to cough up everything as taxpayers or the depression will melt down our country’s economy. No one is sure $750 billion is enough or if it’s going to save our economy but we are sure that we absolutely had to do it, or else?!
So, here’s what I’ll tell them. Get ready to live your lives like you were doing for the last three weeks: watching out for each other and living within your means. Be practical and learn to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Be soooooo grateful that you were able to grow up in America during the largest economic expansion in the history of mankind. Remember the fifth commandment (as well as the others, of course) and watch after your mother and father.