talking2myself

Your Environment Does Affect You.

Dr Martin Luther King once said “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilisation, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilise ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.  Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.”

Over lunch recently here in the UK, my colleagues and I were discussing the ‘lazy’ unemployed  that were scrounging off the state and how our new coalition government was going to put an end to that.   The lazy scroungers must be left to fend for themselves.  I, surprisingly, found myself in a minority of one in that discussion.  What people don’t seem to realise is that it is the system of handling and managing the lazy free loaders that is flawed and not the system of helping those who through no fault of their own find themselves less fortunate that the rest of us.

My point that even counties like Brazil and Zambia (allAfrica.com: Zambia: Cash Transfers Transforming Lives of the Poor) have introduced financial help for the poorest of their citizens for a reason and I hypothesis that it will lead to a more comfortable standard of living for everyone.  After all, stepping over starving children and dodging hungry beggars does not make for a contented lifestyle does it?  Unless we commit ourselves to a minimum standard of living for all, peace and prosperity is but an illusion that can be shattered by the anger of people who have nothing to lose.  Don’t believe me, look around the world and ask yourself where there is happy poverty?

We all have responsibilities, and I tell my children this all the time, as members of a family, as members of the village, as members of our various communities and as members of our society.  The minute we believe we are above meeting any of our obligations, the standard and the level of happiness in our life decreases along with it.   Maybe, we in the Western World have forgotten what real poverty and misery is, but paying less tax, refusing to help our worse off will mean 6 foot walls and armed guards around our houses and little islands of comfort in city centres surrounded by a sea of discontentment, an environment unlikely to make anyone happy.

The always some good in remembering that ‘there but for the Grace of God, go I’.

May you find the balance.