Civility and Community

A friend wrote me the morning after the women's NCAA Basketball Championships that he watched the whole game despite University of Connecticut's domination over Louisville.  He commented that he was impressed with the coach of Louisville's sportsmanship, how he hugged all the UConn players, smiling and laughing with them in their joy over trouncing his own team.  We are, I think, at a loss of that type of civility and community in this country.

I was struck by an article in the New York Times about a dry and arcane subject: municipal bonds.  Apparently over the past few decades the relatively stable and mundane area of municipal bonds has also become a high volume, big money gambling machine.  Essentially, towns and cities have been convinced by investment counselors to issue bond derivatives which bet on interest rates or the bond market itself remaining stable.  The "gift" to municipalities, is that they pay low interest rates during the first few years.  It makes building a new sewer plant far easier.

Of course, as we have seen with all these complex securities, the markets are far from stable, and when chaos happens, the victims are left picking up the tab while the so-called investment whiz-kids are laughing in their mansions.

There can be thousands of discussions about the innocence or vulnerability of the victims, or in this case how financial managers of municipalities really ought to be sophisticated enough to see through these schemes.  But in reality, our society has become less civil, less oriented toward what is good for the community and more about predator and prey.

The Lords of Wall Street viewed everyone as prey.  I am convinced they walked into their offices everyday trying to figure out how to beguile each of us out of our money, not concerned about whether they were helping us or not.  Of course, the pretense, the come-on, was that they were helping us, just like the Lords of Mortgages wanted us all to believe they were helping us lower our interest rates.  It's as if these folks kept dog-eared copies of Lord of the Flies as their guide to daily living on island Earth with all the rest of us rather than the Golden Rule.  

Perhaps as we culturally begin to develop "green ethics" we also need to cultivate a sense of civility and community.  That we are not prey or predator, but rather a community of people.  That we no longer honor masses of money and gluttony as achievement but rather "what can I do for you today?" becomes a sign of greatness.  While regulation of these industries can "force" civility, it will also only cause the "brains" to figure out ways to get around the laws.  These Lord of the Flies issues really must be addressed culturally, to get at the root of it.   

In the meantime, value someone who is trying to do good.