DARKNESS OVER THE EARTH. Averthanus L. D'Souza.
The world's attention is now focused on the global economic downturn which economists are describing as the worst ever - even more serious than the Great Depression of the Thirties. The prognosis is ominous. It is expected to get worse before it gets better. The focus, understandably is on the financial institutions - the Banks, Insurance and Mortgage companies. Public anger is growing over the unconscionable actions of the top executives of these institutions who are so insensitive as to cock a snook at the public at large. They have gifted themselves massive bonuses out of the bailout packages which were made available to them out of public taxpayer's money. Taxpayers are enraged that these bonuses were given even to executives who had left the Banks and Insurance companies a long time ago. One former top executive of a failed Bank sought to justify these bonus payments as being quite appropriate because these characters are the only ones who are capable of undoing the mess which they themselves created in the first place. The real extent of the losses of the Banks and Insurance companies was not revealed at the time of asking for government support. The figures had been manipulated to hide the reality. The actual losses are only now being revealed by the investigators; and the true picture will emerge only after the investigations have been completed. It appears that the practice of fudging of accounts is not limited to the institutions that have requested, and which have been bailed out. The tampering of books of accounts is far more widespread than meets the eye. It is like a cancer which has eaten into the entire system to an extent that is unimaginable. What is even more distressing is the fact that the auditing agencies which are expected to detect such fudging of accounts and to report them to the proper authorities have colluded with the criminals in their criminal activities. In this respect they are also culpable for the collapse of the financial system. The focus of political discussions has now turned to an examination of the entire 'systems failure' and the need to replace the existing system with one which is more transparent and more responsible. It is becoming clearer as the days go by that mere damage control is not going to be helpful. The entire system has to be replaced by one which will be more effective and more accountable. Financial 'experts' and commentators are finally admitting that what has happened is a massive ethical failure - not merely a collapse of the financial system. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that many of the terrorist attacks have been directed against financial and commercial centres - the twin Trade Towers in New York, and Mumbai, the commercial capital of India (these being the more notable), and other economically sensitive centres. These centres represent what is most repugnant to the terrorists - a deification of greed and the unquenchable quest for wealth. The financial institutions are temples of idolatry. After all the preliminary discussions in smaller groups, such as the Davos Conference of Finance Ministers, the Group of the 20 richest countries (commonly referred to as the G-20) is scheduled to meet in April in London. It will be opportune for this meeting to carefully analyse the fundamental values (or rather the lack of values) which underlie the existing financial and commercial system, which has proven to be unreliable and irrelevant to our times. The discussions should not merely focus on financial systems and the need to put in place more regulations; rather, the discussions should concentrate on the values of greed, competition and avarice which have determined the present economic structures, and which have most definitively proven to be unreliable. The entire financial, commercial and trading system needs to be overhauled and substituted by a new system built on the virtues of cooperation, compassion and the removal of disparities between the rich and the poor nations, and between the rich and the poor within each nation. The very idea of competition which has driven the economic system thus far needs to be abandoned in favour of equitable distribution of the Earth's resources and a system of common processing of these resources to benefit everyone. The British Prime Minister Mr. Gordon Brown alluded to this in his recent address to the Joint Houses of the U.S. Congress. The failure of the financial and the economic system, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a larger syndrome which may be described as the cancerous growth of the culture of death. This culture of death is clearly manifest in the lifestyle of the present generation and the general deterioration of human values. It covers the entire spectrum from the beginning to the end of life. The media are overburdened with news of the "advances" which are being made in the technologies of destruction of human life: more effective mechanical, chemical and genetic means to prevent or to destroy human life. Life itself is being perceived as an evil - something that has to be destroyed, and even prevented. Embryonic stem cell research is officially approved and even financially supported by a "democratic" government which claims to abide by the values on which a great Nation was founded - by a Creator who endowed every person with the inalienable rights to life, to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness. Human embryos are fabricated in laboratories only to be destroyed in the name of scientific research. People like Michael Tooley and Peter Singer unashamedly declare that "new born humans are neither persons nor quasi persons, and their destruction is in no way intrinsically wrong." Yet they strongly condemn the fact that "we cruelly and unconscionably oppress and misuse non-human animals by eating their flesh and experimenting on them." Such people (who describe themselves as "thinkers") have no compunction in advocating the killing of new-born babies (infanticide). They find all kinds of reasons to justify their positions. At the other end of the spectrum we have people like Jack Kevorkian, also known as Dr. Death, who plied his trade as if there were no need to justify what he did. "My specialty is death" he said without any apology or any trace of self-consciousness. Time Magazine said of him "With his deadly humour and his face stretched tight around his skull, he has become a walking advertisement for designer death." (Time, May 31,1993 pg.49) In the 1980s while much attention was being directed towards the issue of euthanasia and assisted suicide, Kevorkian devised a suicide machine, or "mercitron" as he called it. But Dr. Death Kevorkian was not an isolated case. There is a move today before the Kerala Law Reforms Commission to 'decriminalize' euthanasia or assisted suicide. There is a draft of a Bill called the "Kerala Terminally Ill Patients Bill" which is sought to be enacted into Law. Among the statements of objectives of the Bill is: "The victim of suffering and his closest relatives after taking responsible medical opinion about the irrecoverability (sic) of pain-free normality creates the right to euthanasia.(emphasis added). Solace, compassion, justice and humanism make euthanasia a legally permissible farewell to life in its misery and desperation." By an incredible distortion of logic and common sense people are seeking to murder their loved ones in the name of "mercy" and "kindness." The world is presently living under a cloud of darkness - the darkness of an unsustainable economic system, the proliferation of a culture of death which promenades under the guise of technical progress and the glorification of art, music and dance which have become meaningless and weird. Even sport has been stripped of any semblance of sportsmanship. It is only about money - the buying and selling of sportspersons and teams; and of course, the spirit of gambling and greed, which, though unseen, is the spirit that drives the sporting enterprise. Averthanus L. D'Souza , Dona Paula, Goa 403 004.
