A good life

You took my silver and my gold (Joel 2:5) 

I am going to ruin a film for you by telling you the ending. The film goes by the strange title of 47 Ronin. Strange to you and me, that is, but if you were Japanese it would be like calling a film Robin Hood. Everyone in Japan knows the story of the 47 Ronin. It is, for the most part, a slightly zany example of a classic Hollywood action movie. Hero underdog seeks revenge on evil villain getting beautiful girl along the way. Except for one oddity. In the end the hero gets the honour of killing himself. 

Now I am a sucker for a happy ending. Even with a film like Minority Report where the villain's come uppance requires a complete volte-face in the plot line, I prefer it that way. But that wasn't the problem. I found myself disturbed at a much deeper level. It revealed in stark terms a gulf between cultural values. In one culture, people's hope is for a good death, in another they hope for a good life. I found my skin crawled at the idea that someone would seek an honourable death as the pinnacle of their time on this planet. It seemed so nihilistic as if everything that went before was emptied of meaning. I still think that is true, but I suspect I have been over influenced by my own culture. A happy life is in a sense just as nihilistic, at least if it is really a version of 'eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die'.

This came back to me when I was watching the news last night. It seems that 38 million Americans are now unemployed. That's the  same number as the entire population of Canada. And the commentator simply noted that the American dream is dead. My understanding is that the American dream is a belief in absolute social mobility. Anyone can move from the bottom to the top of society on effort and talent alone. It is of course a lie, the real 'opiate of the masses'. Social mobility in the USA is lower than many European countries and has been going down since 1980. The reality is that the president is a billionaire's son who can claim to be a successful businessman even though he has lost millions in failed business ventures because he was born rich. And people believe him. Most people are stuck in terrible poverty with no hope of escape. And now the lie is made clear. Unlike a European country, where the government see their role as sharing wealth around so as to defend all the people, the USA have a government with no such agenda. Now the American dream works one way at least, down. Indeed the communist dictatorship seems to have been rather successful by contrast. It may have the sole interest of propagating it's own authority but in a time of crisis it has powers only dreamed of by the rest of the world.

What on earth has this got to do with Joel? Well, God's complaint is an economic one: you stole my people's wealth. So here's the rub. The wealth of the rich nations has been sacrificed to protect their people from this virus. Will they find a return on their investment? And if they don't will they find a new set of values? God's values are neither in a good life nor a good death. God is love. We love because he has loved us and in the deepening of that love is meaning found. It may lead to both a good life and a good death, of course, but we cannot aim at either.

A single stem gives both pink and yellow flowers