Maybe Greedy People 
are really 
Needy People

JENNIFER STONE / Stone’s Throw / KPFA 11jul02

Transcribed by mindfully.org

Today is Thursday, July 11th, 2002, and as George W says, “it’s all recycled stuff.” Is stuff the plural of things?

Oh Hell’s bells, the human race is off its chump.

Absurdities everywhere. Last week I rewrote the Declaration of Independence from a woman’s point of view. The flack from that was all about my PATRIOTISM. Geeeez!

Listen up. Come on, and let’s try a new pledge of allegiance. Mine goes like this:

I pledge of allegiance to the Mother, and to the Earth for which she stands, one world under the goddess, with freedom and justice for every sentient being. And take care of the grass and the trees, while you’re at it. Gaia is great and Gaia is good. She embraces all religions. Like God, she’s a metaphor, an archetype.

As Gandhi said, “truth is God.” He added actually that he had no religion. It’s all poetry folks—or psychology, if you prefer. (Laughter) Yes, you’ve got to keep a poetic perspective before ever man was. She that is nature is and shall be even when our day is done, when mankind has gone the way of the dinosaur, and the Earth is at peace for real.

I am becoming such a misanthrope, my own children are tired of my hand wringing. (chuckle) I just play Tom Waits all day. His new CD is Blood Money. I love it. I’m getting to be a flagellite. You know, a doomsday type. The kind that goes from village to village, whipping myself in public to protest God’s mischief for human error.

I used to think that the human race was doing the best it could, but bloody hell, today the people are like ants when the anthill is kicked over. Our so-called leader is courting catastrophe. Imagine storing nuclear waste in a volcano?! Excuse me!

And how, I ask you, did Saddam Hussein's stepson ever get into this country? I mean, to say nothing of enrolling in flight school. Who’s minding the store? You talk about recycled stuff!

Everywhere you look, it’s hell and high water. A piece of Texas the size of Oklahoma is underwater. Arizona and Colorado burning—set on fire by sociopaths. Oh pardon me—pyromantics. Perfect pitch there.

The man, Lester the firebug, he wanted money. The woman, Terry, she was into love, or the lack of it. She burned a letter from her ex-husband. You remember? Set the world on fire, all for passion. He, the guy, Lester, he needed a job. He needed a job fighting the fire at $8 an hour! (Great laughter…) For that he burned up half the state, the kind our military-industrial complex is famous for.

The experts tell us that the World Trade Center hit was financed for about half-a-million-dollars. Yes, follow the money and all becomes clear and lucid. Our response to terrorism just may break our economy. That’s how the Soviet Union went under.

Now, that old Victorian, Charlie Dickens, he said that ignorance and want are the twin evils of mankind—human society. Yes, want is economic determinism. Ignorance, people are calling that denial these days. I think that ignorance had the biggest part in today’s AIDS holocaust. Sixty-eight more, sixty-eight million more human soles projected to die by the year 2020. That’s WWIII every minute of the day.

I remember Dickens personified ignorance and want as a little boy and a little girl. And he said that of the two, ignorance was the greater evil. I think they’re inseparable. They’re Siamese twins. Where there’s poverty there will be religion, or at least fundamentalist beliefs—absolutes. They go with ignorance. Yes, it’s either black or white, God or the devil, or good or evil. Or as George W says, “you’re either for us or against us.”

When I look at the whole globe, the whole picture, it seems to me that human kind is driven by fear and need and want and anxiety. And that these fears create a culture of cruelty. Of course, right along side that, there’s a culture of compassion. It’s still feminists 6, fascists 9. Eros is always up there doing battle with Zanitos—it’s the life and death thing.

I think of all the compassionate folks, all those lay Catholics—actually, most of the compassionate Catholics I know are ex-Catholics—the ones who are up against that financial organization, the church hierarchy. The money men, yes, they protect their investment in the priests, in the pedophiles, those predators that the Australians call “rock spiders.” My favorite new name—yes—rock spiders.

Every day, I need to remember that there saints among us. Saints struggling to feed the hungry, care for the sick. The people who keep us human provide us with sole-plasma. [This] species is running a little low on sole. (chuckles) A little low on ethics and all that stuff [again referring to Bush’s speech]. It may be recycled, but you know it’s sacred.

Anyway, as the world population explodes there’s less and less time to tenderize each generation. All over the globe, the children are becoming instant adults. Give them a gun and a target before they even know how it feels, how it feels to suffer pain.

My favorite game is imagining a world in which each child grows up… oh, on a warm Pacific island, surrounded by affectionate folks, a clan, a place where education is just the willful acquisition of vulnerability, of ever-greater sensitivities. Oh yes. And how would such a child survive if she came to the main land—to what we still call a “man’s world?” Actually, I think he or she might do very well.

It may be that kindness is one answer to these rogue accountants, to larceny, to greed, and all the rest of it. Maybe greedy people are really needy people. Maybe we all just need love. And maybe money is about the best substitute you ever find.

Love and money, love and money—I used to ask my students which was the most important. And they said they were the same thing.

I wonder about the unmet needs of all the greedy guys. Just think of all the ways we/they could get satisfaction—get some satisfaction without robbing the rest of the world.

This has been Jennifer Stone, with Stones Throw. Til next Tuesday at 3:30, go easy. And if you can’t go easy, go as easy as you can.

Jennifer Stone is a creative artist -- a novelist, poet, essayist as well as a radio programmer. Her witty fast-talking program of social commentary and literary analysis, "Stone’s Throw" airs on KPFA (Berkeley, CA) in the Cover to Cover time slot on Tuesdays at 3-3:30 p.m. She has been at KPFA since 1982. According to David Volpendesta, writing in, In These Times, she “...weaves a spell that immediately seduces the intellect and enlivens the emotions...helps sustain a culture of resistance and animate its soul.”

Jennifer Stone’s books and articles can be ordered by phone at 510-845-5458 or by mail at 

KPFA Pacifica Radio
KPFA Box 90
1929 MLK Way
Berkeley, CA 94704 

Her message phone at KPFA is 510-848-6767 ext 630

• Stone’s Throw (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA)
• Mind over Media (Cayuse Press, Berkeley, CA)
• Over By The Caves (New World Press)
• Telegraph Avenue Then (Regent Press, Oakland, CA)
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