something to ponder while hustling for a buck

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Recently at lunchtime ( at work) a co worker mentioned to us that the big wiggs ( bankers or wall streeters?) dressed up as 'foreclosure people' at a Halloween party.

How compassionate of them.

Every war effort requires the dehumanization of the enemy in the minds of the soldiers. The war on the 99% is no exception.

So we combat this by sinking to the level of the "1%"? Brilliant. When we let raw emotion untempered by logic become the final arbiter in how we interact with others, I guess two wrongs make a right.

Such is populism.

You misunderstood me The employees of the foreclosure mill that organized the homeless-themed Halloween party are mercenaries in the army of the 1%, so to speak. Their costumes show how little empathy they feel for those who were scammed out of their homes by greedy bankers. "Hobos" in general are regarded as barely human by people who buy into Reagan's "greed is good" folly and support the war against the poor.

NP: Finally, you moved to Mexico a number of years ago. Is all this why? Do you ever see yourself coming back to America?

MB: There are a lot of answers to that question, and yes, some of the reasons can be found in the above dialogue. You know, the air is really “thin” in the United States, because the value-system is one-dimensional. It’s basically about economic and technological expansion, not much else; the “else” exists at the margins, if it exists at all. I first discovered this when I traveled around Europe in my mid-20s. I saw that the citizens of those countries talked about lots of things, not just about material success. Money is of course important to the citizens of other countries, Mexico included, but it’s not necessarily the center of their lives.

Here’s what the US lacks, which I believe Mexico has: community, friendship, appreciation of beauty, craftsmanship as opposed to obsessive technology, and—despite what you read in the American newspapers—huge graciousness; a large, beating heart. I never found very much of those things in the US; certainly, I never found much heart. American cities and suburbs have to be the most soulless places in the world. In a word, America has its priorities upside down, and after decades of living there, I was simply tired of being a stranger in a strange land. In A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis and his colleagues conclude that happiness is achieved only by those who manage to escape the American value-system. Well, the easiest way to escape from that value-system, is to escape from America.