Our Greed

The Hell Greed Produces

Human needs include: clean water, nutritious food, safety from the elements and from the aspects of nature that are dangerous.

Why do so many people believe that we deserve access to the planet's resources to satisfy basic human needs? Clean water, nutritious food, safety from the elements and from the aspects of nature that frighten us are simply expected to be available or delivered as if they were our due. Maybe part of the problem is in our not knowing what is "enough". Maybe part of the problem is not remembering to look around and see who needs help and then . . . . SHARE (like our kindergarten teachers taught us) I think the root problems are greed and laziness fueled by self imposed ignorance.

Isn't this familiar:

When we are thirsty, we just go to the refrigerator for a cold beer or soda or to the tap for water that we know is clean and healthy. Of course, we let the tap run for a minute or so to make sure that the water is also cooler. We watch that water go spinning down the drain and I would bet that not one in a thousand Americans can tell you just where that wasted water flows. For too many of the rest of the world's inhabitants, water is more precious than gold.

How about these scenarios:

• We want our food "super-sized" but we throw away large portions of what we buy.


• We use cars that are huge, fuel inefficient, poorly designed and heavy in order to feel "safe" from the other huge, fuel inefficient, poorly designed and heavy vehicles that clog the roads and spew filth into our air.
  
• We then sacrifice our own children and the children of the world to keep the cost of that fuel low.
  
• We want our swimming pools full and our lawns green and our behemoth, SUVs clean.
  
• We pour pesticides and fertilizers onto our lawns and farms but we don't want to be reminded where all those toxins eventually flow.

As a culture we act as if we just don't know or care about how wasteful we are.

How to help people wake up? So many people don't want to see how the rest of the world lives. How to help people wake up to the misery and desperation that millions of human beings face every single day so that we can continue to wallow in wasteful materialism and ignorant over-consumption?

If possible, and the corporate media makes it all quite possible, we simply don't want to be depressed or made to feel shame for our consumption of the world's wealth. People shy away from images placed before them that might make them lose a moment's worth of slumber. Or, worse yet, they are numb to the images -- they are disengaged from that reality when it doesn't touch them personally.

How to help people wake up? How to help people to care? Those are the questions on my mind tonight.