Another one bites the bust

The other night I met with my men's group and the obvious topic was Mr Spitzer's fall from favor. But the discussion quickly veered away from prostitution (as well it should have) since prostitution was not the issue! Prostitution is as old as sex itself and like alcohol, its prohibition only serves to drive up prices and proliferate its use. No. Prostitution is a symptom of a societal and human ill, and Elliott Spitzer is only a symbolic representation of how we want to pretend this disease is someone else's problem. If I/we can focus on him (as he apparently focused on others) and the speck of dust in his eye, then perhaps wee can somehow ignore the log lodged in our own.

But what is the problem? is it simply the greed of wanting more than the other guy has? Or is it the deep spiritual vacuum we have created in "modernizing" our life that allows us to live under the pretense that an Afghan or Iraqi or Mestizo or a woman or a gay are not as human as ourselves. It appears as though we would believe that others are just so much livestock inhabiting the planet without which we all would somehow be much better off.

Nonsense. When I talked with the border crossers, whose drive to feed their children was so deeply rooted that they had no other choice, when I saw the fear in the eyes of the border guard telling us of having to go into situations without "backup", when I played with the kid on the other side of the wall, I felt their humanity - no, read that more like I felt their souls.

What allows a Spitzer to lie to his wife and his constituents? Not his lack of soul but his denial of theirs. What makes us think that putting up a wall or banning a practice will alter the inequities already present in every fiber of the fabric of society; it's our thought that we can legislate problems away because we don't see the souls and faces of the people involved.

Years ago I dreamed of starting a business practice and calling it the Rehumanization Project. I am more convinced today that that is what we need. We (and I do not exclude myself from the masses) have lost our humanity, we have lost our souls, and we need desperately to find them again. Perhaps we should thank Mr Spitzer for the stark reminder that we are all suffering this disease.