Gary Snyder Poet

For The Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

From Turtle Island, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1974.

The Present Moment

                                                      

This present moment:

That lives on,

To become

Long ago

From The Gary Snyder Reader, Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.

The Common Good

A concept useful in setting the bearings for our personal lives and for the goals of political life is that of "the common good".

This is "the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to [the means of] their own fulfillment". That is, "every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups...".*

The need for a general focus on the common good  has been cited with reference to the explosion of practices in  banking where success is acclaimed by a few despite the consequential loss of the homes of millions of Americans and the entrenching of poverty in what was once a confident and proud nation, a pride based on the fact that wealth was shared throughout the society.**
The foolhardiness of having consumerism as the guiding principle for the American economy has been made clear in the latest economic crisis. And it isn't the poor who are to blame for the unsustainable credit that was pushed by bankers. It was not "the banks" that caused the recession, it was those who headed the cohorts of bankers, and those who still snatch incredible wealth from families even in their own community.
*The Church Today (Gaudium et Spes) para 26 in Abbott WM (ed), The Documents of Vatican II, London, Geoffrey Chapman 1966.

**http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11332635
See also http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/daly.html