Nothing Left To Cut

Must be nice for grown, well-dressed men to sit around a long shiny table and wax importantly about worn swatches of their academic expertise, trying to get all the pieces to fit. No matter how much cutting they do, I can guarantee, they will come up short. We’re essentially broke, but let no one even whisper it. They are now down to trading IOU’s in the burnt patches. We’ve long since scraped economic and political bedrock; there’s basically no where left to go.

A while ago the bankers tried the same thing. And it blew up in their faces - as it should.

It’s like having entered a cul-de sac. Only the turning radius of the car we’re driving does not permit us to turn around. The only way out is in reverse.

It’s always difficult to give a shape to something. It’s even harder to abort. There are always egos involved. Sometimes a lost driver will drive hundreds of miles before admitting he had taken a wrong turn back in Omaha. All the issues on the table right now involve destruction - everyone is crying out to be saved. And there are only so many lifeboats.

There are basically two camps at work here. One seeks to promote the illusion that nothing is impossible - that gravity can be reversed; that ice can be made not to melt or water not to freeze. (Stranger things have happened: Just this week, NASA scientists announced they had found a life form that lives on arsenic.) The other seeks to return to an acceptance of traditional cures - like bloodletting. The cynic says it’s already gone to far, that nothing we can do will fix it; that the patient will die in any case. So, let’s just grant him a pain-free passing.

Every one of these points is debatable. Time, however, remains the rub - and it’s egos that time has a habit of suffocating. We should have thought of all that before - while there still was time. Not too long ago it seemed a good idea to kill the economy in favor of votes; as it was a good idea to kill God. Now, we find that all the things we’ve killed off - all that lies scattered in ruins around us - still has the capacity to sting.

The only answer, of course, is to keep cutting; to stay abreast of the rapidly spreading disease. Often, taking a knife to a cancer has the effect of making it more aggressive. …we cut more and more until there is nothing left to cut.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/