Why? Why is it so difficult for us to remember that we’re all in this together?
War, poverty, violence, prejudice cannot ’take center stage’ among evolving humans.
In Tibet, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Darfur, Israel, Colombia, Pakistan, India, Burma and more, on our own Urban streets, we are killing ourselves — fooled by the illusion that we are looking at an-other and not ourselves.
We’re hoarding instead of supporting, of sharing things around — even our own natural resources!
In a board room, administrators decide to lay off hundreds of workers and increase their own salaries. Do they wonder, driving home, how those people and their families will survive in the current economy?
Legislators decide that single moms need to ’get to work’ and off Welfare and rename Welfare, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)–what’s up with this word: needy?? And to figure out the childcare–somehow. Would they aim the same directives at their sisters, their daughters?
Thousands of people with close budgets purchased homes, unaware of the loophole in the lending agreements allowing lenders to raise interest rates at will. Rates are raised and budgets go red. Responsible people lose their homes. Lenders get richer.
Our apartment building’s boiler blows and the real estate agency that owns the building leaves us without heat and hot water for 9 days. Each day we watch the workers go home, leaving us to spend another cold night keeping our ovens on and water boiling for the morning sponge bath. The landlord visits and tells a tale of how his family simply bundled up in blankets when the electricity went off for a few hours. He offers to take $40 off our rents. He was serious.
In therapeutic terms, when a counselor fails to understand her client’s situation, it’s called an empathic failure. This ‘failure’ needs to be remedied. Good counselors are able to ‘be in their client’s shoes’: need to do this, in order to help.
These failures we have with each other are what I cry about these days.
Peace is still a radical idea.
Help make it an everyday assumption.
We can and we must do better. And now is the time.
Enjoy this music from two wonderful peace-makers,
Bono and Mary J. Blige: “Love is a temple. Love is a higher law.”
PEACE to you and yours
~ Ms. SpinC
