I just had an epiphany

I was just sitting here, minding my own business, enjoying a coffee and looking out at the world through the selected windows our national broadcaster has chosen to show me, when it hit me. I’ve been looking at things the wrong way.

I used to be suspicious of business activity because of its long history of exploitation, usury, slave trading, destruction of the natural world and the buying and selling of supposedly freely-elected governments.

I blame the years I spent at the bar in Grogan’s among the mumbling socialists and other malcontents—those who were cast into redundancy during one of Ireland’s annual recessions. Over scrounged pints, we smoked our Woodbines and talked about how much better things would be after the Revolution. All things would be held in common, all labour would be properly rewarded and the leeches of Capitalism would be banished to the deepest bowels of Hell. Governments would answer to all of the people and not just the vested interests of those who had paid for their election. Religion would be tolerated providing it curtailed itself to tending to spiritual needs and assisting those who were impoverished by the inequitable distribution of the wealth of the world that God had given for all kind, human and animal. Utopia beckoned. All we had to do was rouse the people from inertia, drown out the indoctrination of Church and State, and march forward under the banners of equality, fairness and the common good.

But I was wrong and can only offer that I was young and foolish then as an alibi.

Yes, we may be hurtling towards an Environmental Armageddon, drowning in debt, snapping and snarling at everyone along the way, but we must bear in mind that it was “Good for Business.” All that we have sacrificed was done in the most noble of causes—making the rich richer. We must remember this when we grovel on the floor hoping that a few more crumbs might fall from the table of our new aristocracy. And while we are there was can marvel at their splendour and grandeur and know that it was our efforts that helped to put them there. Rejoice in the knowledge that they are modern day saints who spent their lives in the pursuit of jobs and prosperity for all and only sit at the loftiest table to set a good example for the rest of us that we might rise up and become like them.  And when we are gone, poisoned by all that we have done to the world in the surety that it was “Good for Business,” know that the Grand Pyramids of Capitalism will be our eternal gravestones.

So hush your mumbling and grumbling now because, like the fella in 1984, there is nothing more to do than to sit patiently until someone from the government drops by and puts the forgiving bullet in your brain.