by Domnall Óg
Home >> Crisis? What Crisis?
We had a lovely Sunday lunch of paella, followed by home-made tiramisu and coffee with chinchón. My parents-in-law spent the afternoon with us and I played ping-pong, Nintendo Wi and a board game with the kids, Adam and Antonio.
The board game was called Hotel (think Monopoly with room service). The object of the game is to make as much money as you can and bankrupt your competitors. The children, as you would expect, suspended their disbelief and completely entered the cut-throat world of finance. In the end the oldest one, Antonio, won by accumulating a multimillion dollar fortune. Then we had dinner and the kids went to bed.
I have always thought there was something innocent (not necessarily harmless though) about the people who spend their lives dedicated to accumulating money. It’s like the kids playing Hotel. The money is really just a way of keeping score. But,unlike the kids, the financiers and bankers rarely wake up and walk away from the game. They keep the fantasy going.
We are being told that there is a massive crisis in the world’s financial system and every day we hear of new disasters for multinationals. We hear the whining of those financiers who do wake up and they realize that there is no other game for them to play. If we were to believe the media, it is the end of the world as we know it.
And yet, last weekend the daffodils still began to appear in my garden and the birds sang and flew as gleefully as angels on leave. My father-in-law still regaled me with stories of a Madrid that we will never see again and the prittle-prattling stories of the kids’ school adventures made for a family Sunday where everything felt as right as a newly wound clock. In next to no time my garden will be a Jackson Pollock of colours and scents. And in 100 years you and me and everyone we know will be dead. Crisis? What crisis?
The world’s institutions are having a crisis. You’re invited. But you don’t have to go. You could wake up and smell the flowers instead.
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Posted on http://www.weeklyletter.com at 2009-02-26 00:01:00 +0100
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Hi guys
It is too easy to answer that question although all it depends the way you look at life.
If crisis for many means not spending on the latest car in the market or the best purse for ladies while hundreds of millions of kids hunger daily is because mankind is selfish since we were born.
I am pretty sure the luckiest now are the unluckiest 3 years ago. I mean, the ones who decided to invest in a lot annually , and all of a sudden everything turns down and they have to pay high interest rates.
But crisis for me is something else. Millions of people all over the world are being sacked by their companies and they have a family waiting for their salaries to survive.
Greetings
Thanks for your comments Ivan.
Yes, I agree that the ‘crisis’ means different things to different people. Unemployment is a terrible thing but until we change the system that causes it…that needs it…we will achieve nothing. The current system rewards failure by the fat cats and punishes the innocent.
In the UK there is a banker called Sir Fred Goodwin who managed the Royal Bank of Scotland as it made a £24.1bn loss ..that’s £24,000,000,000,000 LOSS!!! He has been given a pension of £700,000 a year for life.
So a worker ,whose company makes them redundant, is unemployed for no fault of their own and a banker (or bankster as they are increasingly being called) who IS at fault gets an obscene reward for his failure.
There comes a time when economic issues become moral issues .
This year I prefer to follow the peaks and troughs of nature in my garden and forget about this Ship of Fools .
It would be nice to be able to accept or no the invitation to the crisis but for a lot of people that isn’t posible.
They and us would be more happy doing like you and spending our time looking at the nature and seeing the spring waking up. I hope human beings will not create a crisis in the biosphere and will be able to continue enjoying with the nature what we will not be able to enjoy with our current account.
p.s.: 24 bn is probably 24.000.000.0000 and not 24.000.000.000.000 what is a lot but not as much.
Thank you Iñigo.
I write in British English and 1 billion in traditional British English is 1,000,000,000,000 (a million million). My North American colleagues would consider 1 billion to be
1,000,000,000 (a thousand million). It’s interesting to note that both US and British speakers of English use commas instead of full-stops to punctuate large numbers. We only use full-stops to denote decimals.
In the western world I think we do have a choice. If we believe that our happiness depends on a TV, a car, a dishwasher etc, then we may well be unhappy when we can’t afford them. But if we decide that our happiness depends on nothing, then we can, at least, minimize the effects of the crisis. We don’t see the world as it is but rather as we are. So we should make changes to ourselves in order to ‘make changes’ to the world.
There’s nowhere you can be which is where you’re meant to be. It’s easy.
(The Beatles All You Need Is Love)