As society becomes wealthy by self-serving means, it disregards not only the needs of its members, but also its own future needs.

I recently saw a television program* about two young men, who were dared by a ravishing blonde to commit increasingly daring acts to rack up points toward winning the blonde for himself. As if cutting down an historical tree and breaking into an army compound and setting fire to a jeep weren’t enough, the men soon found themselves being required to kidnap and kill.

Along the way, the men found themselves caught up in a frenzied competition, exchanging insults with one another and boasting of their masculinity as being superior to the other’s. In short, they became so singularly focused on the game of one-upsmanship that they no longer could see the irrationality of their acts. Too late, they learned that the ravishing blonde was, in fact, no more than a deranged witch of the worst order, someone neither of the men would want in his life.

Today, society is caught up in the same sort of game. Young people no longer start at the bottom of the ladder and learn the ropes as they make their way to the top. Instead, they use their cunning and wiles to force members of the older generation off the ladder in order to take their place at the top. They force out other employees, who are either too old or too severely handicapped to find work elsewhere. In their inexperience, they fail to realize that those people, too, have bills to pay. Most recently, they have begun to devise ways to deprive the people they remove of their retirement accounts. Must save the company money, they say.

At the same time, they find themselves with more money than they know how to manage. They spend more and more and more. They buy bigger and grander houses. They buy flashier and faster cars. They take trips to faraway, exotic locations.

They, too, are playing a deadly game – deadly not only for those they hurt along the way, but also deadly for themselves, for they do all of this without giving any thought of the future and the fact the creative financing they used to buy their mega-mansions and luxury cars will come due one day. They do it without thought of the fact that they will not be young forever and will need whatever money they can save now to see them through the rainy day that eventually comes to everyone.

Worst of all, they are playing a deadly game for society, for no society can survive that does not take care of its members, and when one is completely absorbed in self, one does not take care of those it has pushed aside. Perhaps, in time and, hopefully, before it is too late, they will come to realize that…

“All that glitters is not gold.”
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* "The Joker's Wild, Man, Wild!" Hawaii Five-O. CBS/Paramount, 1969.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Virginia Tolles