THE SYNDROME OF THE LARK THAT HAS LOST ITS FEATHERS

  

This is something known, that consumption is the secret to economic growth. But when we reach a point when we live so as to consume instead of consuming so as to live, consumption transforms itself into a real cancer which brings society directly to its self-destruction.         

Because by consuming like insatiable animals, we fatten up those who devour us: the Banks, the multinationals, the fiscal paradises (with their 32 trillion dollars slipped between the fingers of the income tax!) and all the powerful lobbyists who, to fill up the pockets of their stockholders, lead by the nose the economy, and so politics, of all the countries of the world. That is how our unbridled consumption goes on seeing records of obeseness among those who constitute the 1% of the human fauna and condemns the rest of the world to a dry diet.               

The more we buy, the more we keep the huge machine producing useless and often harmful things which continually clog up the planet.  Debts overburden us. To pull through, we have to split ourselves not only in two or in four, but in ten…Strange illnesses are overcoming us, and our environment, which is the branch on which we are sitting, is being sawed bit by bit every day.        

To better understand the mechanism of that drama in which our senseless consumption plays a leading role, I will relate to you another little bird story that a friend found on the Internet and who was kind enough to send it to me. It is attributed to Luther Burbank, a famous American botanist (1849-1926).

Once upon a time there was a lark that loved to fly very much, but hated to dig the earth to look for worms that would feed it.

One day, the lark passed near a short man who was shouting: « I sell earth worms! Two earth worms for one feather! » Without thinking twice, the lark removed a feather from its wings and exchanged it for two earth worms. The lark was deliriously happy.       

The following day, it went back to meet the little man and gave him another feather in exchange for two worms. This went on for a few weeks until the day when the lark noticed even if it flapped its wings, it could not fly anymore

Being utterly dismayed and feeling ashamed, the bird had to resolve itself to crawl on the ground and learn again to dig it with its beak in order to survive. It was really angry for having swapped its freedom and its lark soul for a vulgar plate of lentils…         

It is quite possible that, pressured by the magic of credit and by billion occasions of doing good business, individuals and nations that only think of consuming,  go and join before long our unhappy lark and its lost feathers.          

The Gospel of Jesus opens the way towards life in abundance, but that way, as we know, is not always that great superhighway that we would like it to be. No doubt that the Gospel wants at all cost to warn us against the consumption fever and against its infectious offshoot, that is the « syndrome of the lark without feathers ».   

                                                                                                       Eloy Roy

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages