Looking at the employment scene in Southeast Michigan, again I'd turn instead to T.S. Eliot's "Choruses from 'The Rock'", written in 1934 in the depths of the last worldwide depression.
I have extracted some verses from the full poem, and then rearranged them for a faster one-pass reading of his message that I think captures his point, which very crudely summarized without mentioning God for the atheist scientists reading this:
This "LIFE" thing that spawned us humans stretches out of sight above and below us. It dominates our lives, not our own constructs. Either we belong to it all, or we deny it all. To claim we are "on top" and break the connection with the half above us is to cut ourselves off, to pull out our own plug out of the walls socket, and it won't "go" any more. Decay is everywhere, when we are subject to the closed universe and laws of thermodynamics, but in LIFE, and only in LIFE, we are in an open system again, where there is continual rebirth and re-creation. Without that living context, both above and below us, nothing makes sense, the center doesn't hold, and our health, our mental health, our lives and our cities and great schemes fall apart as we watch, baffled, helpless to stop the process. Plug it back in, children, and it will start up again.
====== Here's Eliot's much more eloquent statement:
But you, have you built well,
that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?
Where many are born to idleness,
to frittered lives and squalid deaths,
embittered scorn in honey-less hives?
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor,
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.
Will you leave my people forgetful and forgotten
To idleness, labor, and delirious stupor?
In a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs,
Where My Word is unspoken.
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.
We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.
Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.
When the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city?'
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?'
What will you answer? 'We all dwell together
To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?
O weariness of men who turn from GOD
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action...
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.
There are those who would build the Temple,
And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.
If humility and purity be not in the heart, they are not in the home:
and if they are not in the house, they are not in the City.
Why should men love the Church?
She tells them of Life and Death, of all they would forget.
They constantly try to escape
from the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good.
But he man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
Man without GOD is a seed on the wind:
driven this way and that, and finding
no place of lodgement and germination.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown,
the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?
Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,
to men of faith and conviction.
Let us therefore make perfect our will.
O GOD, help us.
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the formless stone,
when the artist united himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life.
The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service.
The lights fade; in the semi-darkness
the voices of the WORKMEN
are heard chanting.
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar.
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the Word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.
The river flows the seasons turn
The sparrow and starling have not time to waste.
If men do not build
How shall they live?
They shall not die in a shortened bed
and an narrow sheet. In this street
There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end
but noise without speech, food without taste.
Without delay, without haste,
We would build the beginning and the end of this street.
We build the meaning:
A Church for all
And a job for each.
Each man to his work.
( Two weeks ago, the news:
SHUTDOWN TAKES EFFECT
State legislators failed to reach a comprehensive budget agreement, so the partial shutdown of state government is in effect as of 12:01am, Monday, October 1. All non-critical employees - those who received a notice of temporary layoff on Friday, September 28, are asked not to report for your regularly schedule shifts until further notice.
Please continue to check this website and monitor media outlets for further updates, and please urge your legislators to agree to a comprehensive solution to Michigan's budget crisis that will end this shutdown as soon as possible.
Thank you.
As a whole country, it is as if we ran out of gas a decade ago, and have been burning the furniture and now ripping up and burning the flooring of the boat, hoping against hope we can figure out why the magic "doesn't work" anymore before we all sink.
I'll retell the story of the man on the roof in a great flood. A boat came by and asked if he wanted a ride, and he said no, his God would save him. The water got up to the second floor and he turned down a second boat. The water got uup to his feet, and he turned down a third boat. Finally he drowned, and dripping water, in heaven, marched down to the pearly gates and asked Saint Peter what had happened. "Why didn't you save me?!!!!" he asked angrily. "Well, we sent three boats..." was the reply.
We can go on dreaming of systems so perfect that no one needs to be good, or we can return to accepting the yoke of a morality that both requires us and rewires us to take good care of each other and the poor. I put that solution on the table.
Cynics may argue we don't have the strength to do this. I'd counter that there is a "sweet spot" that their scientific measurements have left out, captured best by the motto of BoysTown: "He ain't heavy father, he's my brother."
That's the spot that the Toyota Way, and the best side of every religion tries to move us towards and into. Then, there will be enough to "go around" and some "left over."
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