I had a dream

Jul 10, 2014 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I had a dream this week, in fact two dreams. In the first one an Asian mafia group had moved into my house and had stripped me of everything I owned. My household was subjected to the most dastardly behaviour on their part. I didn’t know what to make of the dream, but it was followed by one where a huge rat was living in my house and my efforts to hunt him down were not bearing fruit.
In reality I would not be hunting down any four-legged rat, big or small, but this was a dream. The rat had the audacity to challenge me for trying to get rid of him. This is like corruption, a ‘barefaced’ thing. There was a cartoon in one of the newspapers a while back, portraying corruption as a monstrous rat running down our small economy.
In an episode of Bones which I saw last weekend, entitled “The Graft in the Girl”, the investigators discovered that the bones of a sixty-something year old who had died of cancer, were being passed off as those of a much younger person and were being sold to recipients who became terminally ill.
This is just a plot in an episode of an investigative series, but it mimics our reality. The guilty parties’ love of money led them to perpetrate a crime which was causing death to a number of people. Of course, they weren’t bothered by this. They had become slaves to money.
We do not take a strategic view about our own lives when greed consumes us. When we worship at the altar of money, we let reason desert us, and we do whatever it takes to keep the money coming our way. We may even see or rather convince ourselves of issues that further our personal interests. We may even kill people who do not support our views, and as occurred in that episode of Bones, people died in order for greedy people to make money. We fail to see the bigger picture, the one in which we ultimately destroy ourselves. In Terry Cooper’s “The Responsible Administrator” it is suggested that we need integrity and moral imagination in order for our own lives to have genuine stability.
A lack of ethics reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where the swindlers conned the Emperor and his people into thinking they were selling him a fine suit of clothes, when in fact they were selling nothing at all; a good example of groupthink. In this case the target audience bought into believing something that did not exist, and which was only peddled by the swindlers for their personal gain.
When the love of money takes control, we live a pretentious life where we may lie to ourselves, put out ideas that are self-serving and divisive in order to rule, and ignore the long term detriment to society. We in fact become corrupt. Living for “Now” becomes the important thing. We stifle our conscience and of course make ourselves sick in the process of destroying ourselves. We damage our best assets – our health and family life.
Our failure to see that decisions that benefit a few, rather than the majority whom we profess loudly to serve, leaves a large percentage of the population living in difficult and vulnerable circumstances which create conditions for societal ills to grow.
It is good to remember that our own security is tied up with that of others, whether we like to think about it or not; and that in pursuit of our own selfish objectives, we can become a casualty of our own actions. Responsible administrators recognize how much difference they can make in the lives of the people they serve, and should count it a privilege to do so with integrity. Their own lives will also have better quality. Sincerely doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people, not just a few, promotes that.
Rosemarie Terborg Davis

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