It is the Friday following American Thanksgiving, official opening day of the Greed Season.

Before dawn Friday a ravaging horde, maddened by their greed at the promise of bargains, literally trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death. A man was being trampled to death and the crowd kept stampeding into the store and shopping, going so far as to push the police, who were there to try to save the life of the trampled employee, out of the way of shoppers run riot in their panic at the thought of missing a bargain.

The world economy is in meltdown and the root cause of this meltdown is greed.

Not just the greed of those in the financial system, although their insatiable greed and quest for multi-million dollar bonuses triggered the current economic implosion which has us teetering on the brink of disaster.

The greed was spread far and wide. The greed of shareholders who demanded faster, higher rising stock prices; the greed of executives for the multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses that came with delivering higher and higher stock prices; the greed of workers focused on wages and benefits; the greed of financiers for large fees and interest charges in financing these companies – whether they were viable or not; greed of politicians for the political contributions generated by all this greed; greed by the public that bought into the impossible political promises of lower taxes and wealth for all; greed that reprehensible acquisitiveness, that insatiable desire for wealth.

A house of paper built on the foundation of greed, an empty house collapsing in on itself as if it were of no more substance than a house built out of playing cards.

The price we will pay in correcting the economic mess that building on a foundation of greed is going to be painful, perhaps extremely painful. Unfortunately this pain will fall most heavily on the most vulnerable in our society, those least deserving or able to bear the price.

I strongly advocate that we consider the wisdom of using the virtue of charity as the foundation and as the building blocks with which we rebuild.

Not just the more restricted modern use of the word charity in its meaning of benevolent giving, but charity in the fullness of its older meaning as an unlimited loving-kindness toward all others.

As a result of our greed over the past two decades our food banks are inundated with those who depend on them for the food to sustain life. As a result of the fallout from our greed our food banks are currently being swamped by new clients in need. As a result of focusing on ourselves, donations at our food banks are falling at the very time they need to be rising.

What is needed is a generous outpouring of loving-kindness for others that results in a tidal wave of donations to our food banks (and Christmas Bureaus) assuring that anyone in need will find sustenance.

Let us turn our back on greed and embrace charity in its full meaning of unlimited loving-kindness toward all others and not focus on worrying about our own future economic situation. Rather than worrying about the future, focus on those in need now.

Instead of buying another dust-catcher for that hard to buy for someone on your Christmas gift list, make a donation to you local food bank in their name. Or perhaps rather than an exchange of gifts, you can exchange donations.

Offices often have those $10 gift exchange games. Why not everyone throw the $10 into an envelope for donation to the local food bank? I have complete faith that another game can be found to give people a chance to laugh at our own and others foibles.

We need to be creative and generous in meeting the demands placed on our local food banks by increasing hunger and need in our communities.

It is time and past time that rather than trampling others underfoot, we extent our hand to help up those in need of such help.