A good friend was recently lamenting the plight of the poor in general and the housing crisis in particular. I suppose we can take solace in the ancient mantra that the poor will be always be amongts us, or that blessed are the poor or you reap what you so , or pull yourself up by your bootstaps or i should have applied for section 8 !
These poverty laments always intrigue me- where is it said that everyone is guaranteed life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Okay that was probably written by someone before, but so was the magna carta several hundred years before.
Let them eat cake was said as a revolution unfolded, bread for the masses, 40 acres and a mule, a chicken in every pot ! This historical pre-occupation with surviving and thriving, and who is surviving and who is thriving does make one ponder whether the definition and perception of the problem is inherently beyond solution.
Where is is written that man must care for their fellow man. Or should I say, where is it written that man can never force another man to care for his fellow man. Regardless of what is written,including this blog, perhaps our belief that history is relevant is irrelevant.
Perhaps the historical story that we continue to concoct, that we continue to tell ourselves, that we continue to playback in our memory hardrives, that we continue to reprogram day after day, year after year, century after century is one of supreme myth , fantasy and hubris.
Perhaps we want to believe that we are not viscious, cruel, lethal and vile. Perhaps the dream that we continue to dream is that the lion will lay down with the lamb and that black boys and black girls will live in harmony with white boys and white, while as President Carter would contend, apartheid still reigns in the Middle East.
Perhaps our longitudinal and latitudinal and chronological approach to time and space has blinded us to another belief. Their is a belief that time is timeless. Perhaps in each of our lifetimes we are given to opportunities to create or to react, to build rather than destroy, to heal rather than to harm,
Imagine if our belief in cumulative world history and the collective documentation of civilization"s birth and demise is really a blinding blanket. Perhaps if we look more closely we would see individual human-atoms living and dying, bonding and separating, merging and melting, finding positive linkages and negative linkages.
Perhaps the story is not one of evolution but one of a whirling perpetual infinite state of human-walking-stars traversing the universe of mystery-wonder-splendor-creation-death.
Of course , clearly, by any minimal stretch of the imagination people should not be hungry and without shelter. OPRAH and BIll Gates can buy India and Africa, the world for that matter and we can just pay them rent !
Let's dream real dreams, let's live real dreams, let's be real people and not re-runs !
These poverty laments always intrigue me- where is it said that everyone is guaranteed life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Okay that was probably written by someone before, but so was the magna carta several hundred years before.
Let them eat cake was said as a revolution unfolded, bread for the masses, 40 acres and a mule, a chicken in every pot ! This historical pre-occupation with surviving and thriving, and who is surviving and who is thriving does make one ponder whether the definition and perception of the problem is inherently beyond solution.
Where is is written that man must care for their fellow man. Or should I say, where is it written that man can never force another man to care for his fellow man. Regardless of what is written,including this blog, perhaps our belief that history is relevant is irrelevant.
Perhaps the historical story that we continue to concoct, that we continue to tell ourselves, that we continue to playback in our memory hardrives, that we continue to reprogram day after day, year after year, century after century is one of supreme myth , fantasy and hubris.
Perhaps we want to believe that we are not viscious, cruel, lethal and vile. Perhaps the dream that we continue to dream is that the lion will lay down with the lamb and that black boys and black girls will live in harmony with white boys and white, while as President Carter would contend, apartheid still reigns in the Middle East.
Perhaps our longitudinal and latitudinal and chronological approach to time and space has blinded us to another belief. Their is a belief that time is timeless. Perhaps in each of our lifetimes we are given to opportunities to create or to react, to build rather than destroy, to heal rather than to harm,
Imagine if our belief in cumulative world history and the collective documentation of civilization"s birth and demise is really a blinding blanket. Perhaps if we look more closely we would see individual human-atoms living and dying, bonding and separating, merging and melting, finding positive linkages and negative linkages.
Perhaps the story is not one of evolution but one of a whirling perpetual infinite state of human-walking-stars traversing the universe of mystery-wonder-splendor-creation-death.
Of course , clearly, by any minimal stretch of the imagination people should not be hungry and without shelter. OPRAH and BIll Gates can buy India and Africa, the world for that matter and we can just pay them rent !
Let's dream real dreams, let's live real dreams, let's be real people and not re-runs !
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