The trip
begins with a delay — a one-day Lufthansa pilots' strike that
cancels my connecting flight to New Delhi and grounds me in
Frankfurt, Germany.
Given
the thousands of travelers who had to be booked onto other flights or
put up in nearby hotels, I'm sure the strike met the pilots'
objective of costing the airline a lot of money.
Still,
it didn't do much to generate sympathy among those of us who were
caught in the crossfire, including the beleaguered folks at the
Lufthansa service desk who had to tend to all of us stranded
travelers.
But
isn't that always the way of war, affecting innocents? And how
frequently our actions affect others, knowingly and unknowingly.
I made
the most of the delay by getting a good night's sleep. But first I
had an interesting dinner companion in a woman who is an FBI agent
focusing on international white collar crime. It's her job to try and
return the millions plundered from treasuries by despots to the
people it was stolen from — without getting it siphoned off to
bogus agencies, and thus effectively re-stolen, in the process.
We
agreed that so much of the world's woes are caused by insatiable
greed and the lust for power, and how those two unbecoming traits so
often result in a complete callousness toward the suffering of our
fellow human beings.
And I
went to sleep wondering once again why it is that some of us are
motivated to do good and some of us are driven to commit unspeakable
evils.
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5 comments:
A union strike in the airline industry usually only hurts the ones that supply a paycheck for the workers, the passengers. Management is not affected. Managements job is to get as much work out of the union for the least pay and the unions job is to not kill the golden goose but squeeze every last egg out of the company. What is generally missing in both is morals. When a union goes on strike and the company temporarily shuts down, other employee groups both union and nonunion miss a paycheck - is that moral? When management take a company into bankruptcy as a business tatic so they can gut pensions and pay as did all the major airlines - is that moral?
It's about the balance between "me" and "us". If it goes too far to either side, it's not good.
Luke has an interesting blog well worth reading today
http://kawaehawaii.blogspot.com/
Your FBI agent might start with the Clintons and then review the "loans" to the fake alternate energy companies that sucked up billions under Obama.,
@ 7:38 Or maybe the billions in cash that disappeared in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or the billions paid to Halliburton for the failed "Restore Iraqi Oil" contract and other "work" for the taxpayers.
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