On The Recent Economic Downturn

At some level most of us knew they were coming. Who doesn’t know that a society in which the rich get richer while the poor get poorer is a society that will some day have to pay the piper? Who doesn’t know that an economic system that encourages us to live beyond our means and refuses to regulate greed is one in which our avarice will come back to bite us? Who doesn’t know that at every level of life, from personal to global to cosmic, what goes around comes around? The problem is not that we don’t possess a capacity to know these things. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have all the colloquialisms I just used. The problem is that the knowledge we need, like the seismic shifts that create eruptions, originates underground. It comes from a place within us deeper than our intellects.

– Parker Palmer