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COMMON WONDERS
CHUMP CHANGE
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services
Mad cows and agribusiness, Halliburton's price-gouging orgy in Iraq,
mind-numbing CEO salaries, employee benefit cutbacks, Wal-Mart's
"dead peasant" insurance policies on underpaid janitors.
Christmas overkill. Orange alert. Sorry, but I'm losing confidence in
the American economic infrastructure. Freaking out is what I mean. I'm
doubting its very rationality, let alone its self-governing moral
capacity.
Free speech is suspended in Miami while fat cats secretly carve up
the Americas for profit? (This was in November, at the Free Trade Area
of the Americas meeting, a.k.a. NAFTA on steroids.) Do we think a
permanently impoverished Third World is in our best interests? Pardon me
while I write naively, as a schlub, everyman with a small chunk of chump
change that counts as my nest egg.
I'm not smart about money, but I've stayed solvent and pretty much
clung to the piggybank maxims of my childhood: Save your pennies,
balance your checkbook, pay your bills, stay within your means, give to
those in need. This is the level at which I understand money, and I say
this with no pretense of virtue in my relative ignorance. Beyond that,
I'm afraid of money - I fear it as a force, a bottom-line moral arbiter.
Mammon giveth, Mammon taketh away. Post-GM Flint, Mich., as Michael
Moore has pointed out, takes on the look of post-McVeigh Oklahoma City.
A nature preserve on a piece of prime suburban real estate has no choice
but to morph into a shopping mall. Well, what else is new? I've known
this for a long time, but mostly as an abstraction. You can complain
about the economy just like you can complain about fatty foods, but you
can't give up eating. You can't give up playing the only game in town.
And in spite of my best efforts at staying as naïve as possible, I am
not one of life's economic losers. Hence, my little stash of
aforementioned chump change. Because of it, I decided at one point that
I needed an accountant. It's all his fault. Thanks to him, I can no
longer avoid feeling troubled at a deep, participatory level. Flashback
to 2002, when the mutual fund into which he suggested I tuck my stash
started hemorrhaging. Only after a quarter of its value had disappeared
did I realize that, all along, I'd been gambling, and only with that
realization did a sense of shame sink in, not at the gambling, but at
the eyes-closed, genteel greed - my own - that permitted it. I just
wanted a nice bang for the buck. I didn't want to look at where it came
from - you know, whether I'd helped capitalize Rape, Pillage and Burn
Inc., or maybe a subsidiary of Enron, in the process. If you want to
draw a blank look, try talking to an investor about such matters. I did
try, actually. After I dumped the bleeding mutual fund I came clean
about my conscience, so he suggested a socially screened fund. Fine, I
said, but first - temporarily, for safe keeping - we threw what was left
of my nest egg into a money market account. It's my little piggybank.
It's still there a year and a quarter later, generating wimp interest
and the occasional pained e-mail from my money guy informing me how
worried he is that the nest egg isn't back in play yet. I don't quite
know how to tell him that I'm waiting for hell to freeze over. Or short
of that, word that Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream) and Paul
Newman (the salad dressing magnate) are archetypal CEOs, and that
businessmen's eyes have begun to light up at the prospect of being
socially responsible. I'm also waiting for something other than money to
fuel the electoral process, and for something other than oil to fuel our
machinery. I know I'm nuts. I know I wasn't making a difference before
and I'm not making one now. Nor do I know how long I'll hold out. Money
talks, after all, and my small stash is screaming at me. Shut up, I tell
it. I'm thinking.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is
an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated
writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com
© Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Bob Koehler is strongly community-based and a close friend
of John and Julie Auer from Chicago
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Prayer
Quotations from "Letter
from the Birmingham City Jail,"
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Litany by W. B. McClain and L. H.
Stookey
Leader: We remember the conviction of Martin
Luther King, Jr., that "freedom is never voluntarily given by the
oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
People: Therefore, we pray for courage and
determination by those who are oppressed . . . .
Leader: We remember Martin’s warning that
"a negative peace which is the absence of tension" is less than
"a positive peace which is the presence of justice."
People: Therefore we pray that those who work
for peace in our world may cry out first for justice . . . .
Leader: We remember Marin’s insight that
"injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality Tied in a single garment of
destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."
People: Therefore, we pray that we may see
nothing in isolation, but may know ourselves bound to one another and to all
people under heaven . . . .
Leader: We remember Martin’s lament that
"the contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an
uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status
quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power
structure of the average community is consoled by the Church’s silent and
often vocal sanction of things as they are."
People: Therefore, we pray that neither this
congregation nor any congregation of Christ’s people may be silent in the
face of wrong, but that we may be disturbers of the status quo when that is
God’s call to us . . . .
Leader: We remember Martin’s "hope that
dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of
misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities and in some
not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood and
sisterhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating
beauty."
People: Therefore, in faith, we commend
ourselves and our work for justice and peace to the goodness of almighty God.
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