Losing our Human Countenance?

Maclin Horton's Light On Dark Water has asked a very important question:

Can we really look around at our society and say it is not in danger (at least) of losing its human countenance?

Maclin's reflections which lead to his question should give pause to all Americans, no matter their political leanings:

Most conservatives have always acknowledged the principle that, in the words of Pope JPII, “there are many human needs which find no place on the market.” But the principle remained an abstraction in the hurly-burly of political life, especially when the opposition was more or less socialist. The predation, the commercialization, the inanities, the saturation marketing of big business were perhaps something to be sighed over—but, after all, prosperity is fundamentally a good thing, and conservatives are rightly prejudiced in favor of liberty, even when we aren’t entirely pleased with its fruits.

The time is past when that response is adequate. With corporations increasingly able and willing to sell—not just to sell, but to market with the utmost cunning and aggression—anything to anybody, and to exert the considerable power of their wealth and propaganda on behalf of “progressive” causes which attack religion, the family and indeed the person at the root, it’s time for some sort of definite resistance. There should be the potential here for alliances with political liberals in limiting corporate power, although I’m not sure how much interest “social issue” liberals have in doing such a thing now that corporations are increasingly on their side.

It seems the old lines of conservative and liberal do not work anymore. They are antiquated labels in a globalized, homogenized world increasingly run by megacorporations. I believe in free-market capitalism, but I also believe in social responsibility and our human obligation to care for the widow and orphan. This is not a responsibility we can shove off to the government and wash our hands of. It is something staring each and every one of us in the face, demanding that we live in the shoes of our humanity.