Coleridge and me, we would’ve understood one another:

“Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens – it either stupifies me, and then I perhaps look at a merry-make & dance the hay of Flies, or listen entirely to the loud Click of the great Clock / or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophic Self-complacency. – For a thing at the moment is but a Thing of the moment / it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself thro’ the whole multitude of Shapes & Thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged – between which & it some new Thought is not engendered / this a work of Time / but the Body feels it quicken with me—-”

So often I think of nothing, awash in trying to perceive.

Even in the context of the financial crash, we spend too much time examining and pillorying the behavior of individuals and even institutions when we should be instead evaluating and combating problems that are systemically based.

Of course, the focus on the system is what is intended to be diverted by the sacrificial scapegoats offered up from time to time. Which is to say, Lehman Brothers and Enron, Angelo Mozilo and Bernie Madoff – the prosecution and the vilification of these institutions and individuals serve to perpetuate the system as it stands, not to diminish it.