Why Is Prosperity So Painful?

To The Editor:

Today pain is everywhere although different segments of our multi-national country may be feeling it for the first time or greater than ever. How did we get here? Complacency and comfort over time. During our decades of prosperity we are on auto-pilot. How could anything go wrong? Since WWII, it has not; not really. Even the least prosperous of our citizens, who suffer the most, have greater prosperity than those throughout the world who look on enviously.

Government and gigantic corporations provide more and more for us as we as individuals and communities provide less and less for ourselves. Where is our ability to provide for our own good? We have willingly given up self-generated prosperity at a greater price to our freedoms, taxes, goods and services.

Can we afford this dependence forever? We lean more and more on the painful gifts of those who govern our lives - economically, politically, sexually, financially, socially and spiritually. As any empirical trend analysis proves day after day, our prosperity has become less and less and our dependance more and more painful.

Jim Howse La Grange