The Constellation Learning Newsletter
December 2008

The world has changed since last I wrote you in September. With the economic meltdown and presidential election as well as the myriad interconnected global implications of both, the paradigms by which we have lived for a generation are disappearing before our eyes.

To say we are each required to see with “new eyes” is no longer trite; it’s true and a skill set required for survival, like water on a long desert trek.

In considering my message during this holiday season, I came across the following. The words were spoken by a great man in a similar time of unprecedented tribulation. He says all I could and more, so I leave you to consider the man, the message, and the perspective that history has lent to those times. Great good unfolded and we began, once again, to remember what was truly important in our lives. May we do so again.

As we enter a new year, one fraught with financial fears, may you also see the vast opportunities for extraordinary change, positive, necessary change, as we each mine the riches of our own resiliency.

Remember: the human cell—and consequently the entire organism—can be in either protection mode (fear) or growth mode (trust), but not both. It’s one or the other and it’s yours to choose.

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~ Monthly Message ~

“The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself —nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. President, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933 --

"In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone.

“The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.”

-- Paul Heyne --

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