thought of the day.474

The Tea Party’s general thrust is complaints against the Federal government; the 99% folks seem to be focusing on corporations, particularly the financial sector. In some regards, I think they are both right. But it is not because they are people’s enemies; if so then Pogo’s line is true: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Corporations and government are not aliens; they are lines of work we are all involved in. However, because we are fallible beings with positive and negative traits, they can become dysfunctional cultures and, I think, they are more dysfunctional than in times past.

We are indeed individuals with individual consciousnesses who make individual decisions, but we also congregate into social groupings and each one develops a culture to which we contribute and which also shapes us. The family is a culture, the place you work and what you do is a culture, your place of worship is a culture, your neighborhood is a culture, if you do a hobby that you do with others – well, that is a culture. Cultures have rules and beliefs and ways of doing things. Each city, each rural area, each state, has a culture right up to our national culture. You can pick out general traits of each culture. We hardly give them a second thought.

We have become quite aware of dysfunctional family cultures: the ones plagued by substance abuse, the ones plagued by physical and/or psychological abuse, the broken homes, the stressed out close to the breaking point. Any individual culture can become dysfunctional, from the smallest to the largest. Blaming does a lot more harm than good; blaming itself, I think, is dysfunctional. But probably we all do it from time to time. I know I do. The thing is to not attack the institution; the thing is to find and attack the dysfunction.

Franklin Budd Siegle