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Live as Friends or Die as Fools |
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“Your Honor…for many years I operated a Ponzi scheme. I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal…I am here to accept responsibility for my crimes by pleading guilty.”
This is a portion of Bernie Madoff’s confession before a judge in Manhattan Thursday morning. His actions made the original Ponzi look like an eagle scout. Madoff masterminded the biggest swindle in American history to the ching of $65 billlion dollars.
I’m reminded of an ancient teaching story by a Galilean Rabbi.
“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul will be required of you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’”
Rev. Martin Luther King preached an enduring sermon on this parable.
“The rich man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on others….”I” and “my” occur 12 times. He had lost the capacity to say “we” and “our”…When an individual or a nation overlooks this interdependence, we find a tragic foolishness.”
“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny…I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Bernie Madoff has become the current face of an American spiritual disease. We will make a grand error if we scapegoat Madoff and the legal financial swindlers of our day. The soul crisis we face now cries out for a good long gander in the mirror, individually and collectively.
Mr. Madoff is going to jail for a long, long time, and will likely die there. We stand at the gate of our self made prisons. We can lock our hearts away or walk purposely toward freedom as we chart a fresh future.
Rev. King offers a simple, clear verdict. “If we do not learn to live together as friends, we will die apart as fools.”
Amen.
naw..man..boot the parables..a ponzi scheem isnt ‘ONE’ person..so what, he falls on his billion $sword..do you think his jail cell isnt gonna have the same things his pent house jail didnt have??..his famley co- hurts will make sure he lives out his life…in what was his under-cover p.t. barnum style//a sucker born every min..but it helps to have the gov. to make sure your haul is more than 2 bits.
A.M. agreed a ponzi scheme isn’t one person. My primary point is that the soul searching begins with me and radiates out to the big boys.
Soulfully,
Chuck
Do you think that they will ever be able to extract information from him as to who else was involved in this scheme? http://www.newsy.com/videos/madoff_goes_to_the_big_house/ looks at what’s to come. Its pretty good.
I bet over time Madoff will come clean as to who else is involved and where the $$ is. He will have a long time to wrestle with his conscience.
Soulfully,
Chuck