Affects everything

I am increasingly fascinated by money, the getting of it and what it means to Americans and this society. That may sound like a very strange sentence, but there are times when I read about money in the Times or more especially, in the Authorized Version, the Wall Street Journal, that I feel like an alien reading about what another life form believes to be their salvation. For many Americans, there has never been a better time to get rich really fast than now. If I lean out my window, across this small patch of Harlem I can hear construction sites in every direction. People are fixing, building. Something's up. It's a good thing, don't get me wrong. But somehow it stinks too.

Wealth was often a topic when I was a little kid growing up in Ireland, not of the cold, hard cash variety, but another kind of wealth nearly as important to many Americans:

To lose one's wealth is much,
To lose one's health is more --
But to lose one's soul is such a loss
That no man can restore.

Times of great prosperity and intense religiosity seem to me to be kind of special moments in human history, not least because one would expect one to cancel out the other. If you are spiritually rich, what's the need for stacking up cash? If you're loaded, wouldn't you be too busy with material enjoyment to ponder the afterlife. I know I am somewhat being simplistic here, but generally, missionaries go from developed countries to poor parts of the world where people in poverty are at very least glad of some attention. (Anyone from Ireland will be all too familiar with what might lie behind a seemingly innocent question like: "I say, would you like some soup?")

I'm not sure where I am going with this, but anyway... I'll continue carping away about this as time goes by.