Rock of Ages

In one of the recent speeches President Obama referred to Sermon on the Mount and his call for a house built on rock rather than on sand is thought provoking.

Bill of Rights like Magna Carta is a testament and it cannot set aside from the pulse of a nation. Nation is made up of living people and if such a testament cannot march in step with them it remains a dead letter. Thus President Obama is right in calling for a complete overhaul of American values. Take capitalism as a cornerstone of American enterprise. How does that connect with values of other nations? We are all part of a global village and this being the case, American capitalism needs to be built on something more permanent if it is to be worthwhile for others. "It is simply not sustainable," he said, "to have an economy where, in one year, 40% of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets." There the President put crapitalism in a nutshell. Are not Americans making their values impossible by disconnecting certain national characteristics from the times of the age?

The pioneering spirit of the backwoodsman is as different from the carpetbaggers or the robber barons of post civil war era. How can one reconcile Jay Gould the wily robber baron with Davy Crockett? Both are child of their times as Madoff is a symptom of a generation that tried to make greed synonymous with American values. Look how China reinvented itself under Deng Xiaoping. The Party had no difficulty in marrying off Communism with Capitalism and the New China is no more true than those who heeded the call of the Great Helmsman. Time is of the essence and national values are laid down by citizens who try to be relevant. We need to remember ideology becomes almost obsolete by the time it is written. Lenin could not have predicted his Worker’s Paradise would be bedeviled by Stalin and Trotsky. Yet bravely he worked himself to an early grave thinking his ideology shall live on. In China those who took part in Cultural Revolution and waved the little red book may have helped Chairman Mao silence his detractors, but were totally irrelevant to the march of events that made Market Socialism inevitable. Unlike Mao Tse Tung, Deng Xiaoping never held office as the head of state or the head of government, but served as a catalyst to bring to light the spirit of his times. His influence on his people from 1978 to the early 1990s was immeasurable. He was instrumental in introducing a new brand of socialist thinking, having developed Socialism with Chinese characteristics and Chinese economic reform, also known as the socialist market economy and partially opened China to the global market. He is generally credited with advancing China into becoming one of the fastest growing economies in the world and vastly raising the standard of living. Time made the change inevitable and those who switched the ships mid-sea didn’t bring new national values but they made their achievements as synonymous with the spirit of the times.
This is the Rock of Ages from which we develop our national values.

benny

Dear Diary: entries #2-3

He who puts into the world which, he lives in more than he takes out of it, has the world indebted to him.

3.
Autobiography is going down the memory lane, walking ten feet tall in places where you crawled.
benny

Dear Diary©

entry #1
A mind that can dream and hands that can shape the dream to reality; A man with such credentials would not be complaining of life passing him by.
benny