High on my list of frightening realities in our world is the disparity between rich and poor. It has been shown that now the richest 85 individuals in the world collectively have more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion people in the world.
I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a disgusting reality.
I’ll never understand how a billionaire can continue to get richer while letting children starve. It just doesn’t make sense.
It seems that politicians have sneakily created a trickle up economics that pushes the rest of us, and especially the poor, further down into poverty. And extensive political lies and rhetoric do not remove the truth of simple, personal greed.
We once were a country that was highly respected---the best and most caring in the world. We used to have a sense of patriotism and compassion. (“Give me your tired, your poor….”) We used to be a proud and united country of immigrants from all over the world. As a society, we once genuinely cared about goodness and expected it in our leaders.
But somehow we have been made to feel powerless and insecure in our ability to create a healthy, balanced, and compassionate society. Although we are starving for a sense of belonging, we can no longer depend on social identification with good situations to bring us together. So instead we rely on sometimes ignorant and superficial behavior that goes viral while keeping each other at a safe texting distance.
It has long been known that the individual levels of self-esteem in a group can determine collective behavior, and if especially low, can easily bring on negative outcomes. In other words, although genuine love can raise us up, immature, power driven, and deceitful influences can bring us down as a group---especially if accompanied by fear. Right now it seems as if sociopathic behavior and influence is winning.
Maybe the problem is that there is such a huge dichotomy between the number of people living out of fear and the number of those living out of love. To live out of fear is to stay at an immature level, following the level of an immature crowd. To live out of love is to grow in faith, maturity, and compassion.
And to do this--to live out of love instead of fear—is to do something, anything, to increase the dignity and quality of life for all persons.
I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a disgusting reality.
I’ll never understand how a billionaire can continue to get richer while letting children starve. It just doesn’t make sense.
It seems that politicians have sneakily created a trickle up economics that pushes the rest of us, and especially the poor, further down into poverty. And extensive political lies and rhetoric do not remove the truth of simple, personal greed.
We once were a country that was highly respected---the best and most caring in the world. We used to have a sense of patriotism and compassion. (“Give me your tired, your poor….”) We used to be a proud and united country of immigrants from all over the world. As a society, we once genuinely cared about goodness and expected it in our leaders.
But somehow we have been made to feel powerless and insecure in our ability to create a healthy, balanced, and compassionate society. Although we are starving for a sense of belonging, we can no longer depend on social identification with good situations to bring us together. So instead we rely on sometimes ignorant and superficial behavior that goes viral while keeping each other at a safe texting distance.
It has long been known that the individual levels of self-esteem in a group can determine collective behavior, and if especially low, can easily bring on negative outcomes. In other words, although genuine love can raise us up, immature, power driven, and deceitful influences can bring us down as a group---especially if accompanied by fear. Right now it seems as if sociopathic behavior and influence is winning.
Maybe the problem is that there is such a huge dichotomy between the number of people living out of fear and the number of those living out of love. To live out of fear is to stay at an immature level, following the level of an immature crowd. To live out of love is to grow in faith, maturity, and compassion.
And to do this--to live out of love instead of fear—is to do something, anything, to increase the dignity and quality of life for all persons.
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