Rules for Living

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Here in the UK at the moment, we are obsessed with the doings of our elected Members of Parliament, and of the members of the House of Lords. 

 

Specifically, a huge row is raging about MPs’ expenses.  MPs have been making outrageous claims for expenses which are, of course, being met by us – the taxpayers.  This dominates all the papers and all the television news reports.  My favourite claim was for a moat to be cleaned.  I’m thinking my moat could do with a good clean, too. 

 

Plus, two MPs claimed for payments on their mortgages which had already been paid off.  And one claimed for payments on one house, which he listed as his family home, while his wife, who is also an MP, claimed for a different family home. 

 

For the first time in hundreds of years, the Speaker of the House has had to resign. 

 

New Labour, under first Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown, have striven to bring into force as many laws as possible.  Every time they want to bring about a societal change, they reach for the statute books and introduce new legislation.  Yesterday, I saw a TV commercial about the fact that it is illegal to bring foodstuffs into the country from outside the EU.  Instead of educating people, the government prefers to legislate and then punish people for breaking any of the the ever-increasing body of laws. 

 

This mentality has contributed to the current scandal.  One of the drawbacks of using legislation as the primary method of societal change is that our politicians believe that, as long as they stay within the rules, they can do what they want.  So their main defence when outed for their extraordinary expenses claims has been “I didn’t break the rules”. 

 

Instead of examining whether they were truly serving their constitutents by claiming for cleaning and decoration of their homes, most of them focused on whether or not their claims were allowable by law. 

 

They have been more concerned about sticking to the rules than about the real rules for living. 

 

Amidst all this, America seems very distant.  I do wonder sometimes what the President makes of all this.  Is he worried about whether his administration is squeaky clean?  He probably isn’t.  Being the first African American President, he is under so much scrutiny that I’m sure he has had to go to extraordinary lengths to prove that his people were and are above board. 

 

If someone in the Obama administration had behaved like the British politicians, the President would have been lynched, or at least tased, by the press and his detractors.

 

It’s great to see that he still has such a high approval rating after his first 100 days.

 

The President is still on message.  He is not offering us an easy ride.  It’s not within his power to do so.  He keeps emphasising that we are all in this together.  I respect him so much for this.  Like FDR before him, he has come to office at a particularly difficult time in our nation’s history.  And like FDR, he has come to serve.  He has not come to wave a magic wans and make our problems go away.  He has come with a new vision.  In an age of selfishness, he is stressing the need for co-operation. 

 

It is our self-serving attitudes that got us into this global financial mess in the first place.  Only by working together collectively can we begin to find solutions. 

 

To read more about this, see The Key to Financial Prosperity. 

 

As the President stated in his recent address at Notre Dame, selfishness is a zero-sum game.  I could not agree more.  As a Buddhist, I believe that everyone is connected to everyone else.  Yes, we all have these self-serving tendences.  But when we give in to them, everyone suffers. 

 

Click here too watch the video. 

 

See also: 

Video Budget Message from President Obama 

It is said that we get the politicians we deserve.  If this is true, America must be doing something right.