(Week 7 - Friday, Sept. 12)
On September 11, 2001 two hijacked airliners slammed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, another into the Pentagon in Washington DC, and a fourth went down in a field in Pennsylvania. This cathartic event is destined to define the world for our time, perhaps for all time, contingent upon whether we choose to be merely reactive, or to grow in the face of the reckoning it presents. Do the commonly invoked religious/ideological arguments, a supposed "clash of civilizations," or even the phenomenon of terrorism constitute the most fundamental questions presented by this event? Is it not, rather, about whether humanity is able take a quantum evolutionary step up upon this calamity, or instead succumb to a descent into deepening acrimony, violence and darkness. Fear ripples out, the Constitution is subverted, military forces deploy, dark specters haunt the media, and World War III is talked about by pundits as a foregone conclusion. America, many fear, slides towards losing its principles, its mission, and its destiny, much to the detriment of the world at large.
Seven years have passed. The task of civilization now is to redeem horror of "9/11" to a new meaning. In a veritable sense, this tragic event was a culminating convergence of an unrecognized historical malady that has its roots in ancient times. To a great extent, it arose out of the failure of humankind to come to a profound realization of the true nature of "Money." To be sure, heated debate in the public discourse that touches upon money swirls around the event, but because it rarely talks about how and by whom it is created and issued, it is for the most part a distraction that misses the mark. The blessing that the medium of money potentially represents has been co-opted for gain, much to the undoing of human well-being and edification.
Those gleaming towers were magnificent structures, but to many of the impoverished masses around the world they seemed to mock their desperate plight. In an address to the nation shortly after the catastrophe our President, George W. Bush, asked rhetorically "Why do they hate us?", and then answered, "They hate our freedoms." I have no doubt that there are those who peer at America with hateful, envious eyes, and covet the intention of doing it violence, but we are a nation of providence, constituted to bring something new to the world.
The American Revolution was a three-legged stool. Two of the legs any schoolboy who does his lessons is familiar with; i.e. (1) personal freedom within the context of (2) democratically-determined law. But, what was the third leg? It was the bringing of a new economic order founded on the ideal that the people are sovereign, and endowed with the essential right of the sovereign; 'to coin our own money and regulate the value thereof,' and thereby possessed of the means to not fall under the heel of the moneylender.
Our consciousness of that third mandate has slipped, almost to nothing, until we are become the world agent of the Bank-of-England (now Federal-Reserve) "debt-money" system; the very foe that our colonial forebears defeated on the battlefield, and the people have through episodes of our history striven to eradicate.
I would suggest that "they" (the resentful millions of the world, to the extent that that is the case) do not hate us for our freedom, but for our failure to live up to its promise. We have let our nation become the instrument for exporting the private-debt-money tyranny that those who came before us once had the inspiration and common sense to resist. Fortunately, the dream does not die easily, as the people of the world still await the awakening of America to its authentic calling.
The world is now one world, and faces all-together a convergence to a terrible 'end-of-time'; or the opening up to a liberating new dispensation. The providential moment of ultimate choosing is at hand, and the 911 event was a throwing down of the gauntlet. This assault was meant to take the world from us; let us resolve to take it back, and this time rectified to a more perfect truth.
Emphatically, none of this is to absolve the heinous acts that were committed on that terrible September morning, nor to say that those responsible need not be brought to justice. Rather, it is a call to regain our destiny as individuals, as a nation and as a world community.
In holy writ we are admonished to "get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding." Horrific images of 9/11 and its fallout have been burned into the hearts and minds of people in every niche of the globe. It is necessary now that they be informed with new understanding. Rather than seek vengeance out of a feeling of being victimized, it is imperative that we the people of this nation, and indeed the world, embrace the opportunity for maturation that this crisis presents, and step up upon it to a new vision; one founded upon true brotherhood in a just social order, and that made manifest in a transformed economic life.
Richard Kotlarz
richkotlarz@gmail.com
The complete set of columns from this series is posted at the following websites:
http://economictree.blogspot.com/
http://www.concordresolution.org/column.htm
Friday, September 12, 2008
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