If we want a more equitable world
Where the divide between the haves and the have-nots is more akin to a freshwater stream than a Grand Canyon?
When I was a child raised in a middle-class liberal family, I was told that poor people were lazy, that they were takers, sucking the life out of government programs.
It took a hard stint at being a single self-employed parent to have that delusion broken into one million pieces.
It took realising that poverty is multi-dimensional. Not just lack of money, but entrenched lack of access to quality education, people of influence, and the leverage that money buys to reduce taxes and employ the many available expressions of socialism that comes with wealth. Bailouts for the too-big-to-fail companies. There is less tax to pay than the person at the bottom, leverage from political donations, advantage plus advantage that increases the divide.
If we want a more equitable world then something significant has to change. Including our stories of poverty. Especially the entrenched entitlement that lives at the top, sprinkled with a hefty dose of greed.
When we are used to wealth and privilege, giving up a little is hard to do.
Yet if we want our youth to have a better life than ours, if we have a strong sense of justice, gratitude and generosity, if we have reconciled our relationship with what is enough, and if we want to leverage the exponential potential of humanity, then those who have excess and accumulated wealth, need to agree to relinquish some of their privileges.
What will it take for this to happen? Generational change? Catastrophic change? Or simple human decency?
Photo Taken February 26th 2023
