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To the Editor: 

The eruptive surfacing of the corporate accounting scandals in the past few months exposes a much deeper pathology in the human family. Unfortunately, what it demonstrates is that we are not acting like a family at all. With American big-business practices leading the charge, it has become painfully clear that, for the most part, the players on the world stage have yet to see beyond their atomized self-interest and reconcile themselves to the fact that actions have consequences for the entire fabric of human society, including the perpetrators of the socially solipsistic self-serving mantra of the ‘marketplace.’ 

Greed, avarice and stupidity are nothing new in the denouement of this planet’s evolution, or perhaps lack thereof. What is new is the spiraling, momentous effects of unbridled ignorance, in the spirit of infinite opportunism, infesting the mythology that suggests anyone and everyone can have it all.  

Despite appearances, this pathetic condition “inhumane” is not confined to American capitalism. Corruption and the hoarding of economic power has earmarked virtually every social-political community from the inception of the agricultural era and what is commonly accepted as the beginning of history. But it is in American capitalism that the moral pathogens display themselves with such inglorious abandon. Moreover, the technology and communications revolution that the western economic fortress has spawned, has thrown its ugly ethical emptiness smack back in the face of its pollyanna poses and counterfeit commercial smiles. 

In what may be evolution’s greatest ploy, it is this irony wherein lies our greatest hope: To see ourselves for what we are becoming while having the presence of mind and resolve to act upon ourselves before we are all girdled in passive witness to an orgy of rapacious, elitist entitlement and the complicit, convulsive consumption that has come to define modern man and his aiding abetting, better half. 

Marcus O'Realius 

Oakland