Is it just me, or is the world starting to shudder and falter and ... and ... well, who knows?
We tut and sigh when waters wash over the poorer, and lives are squandered in overcrowded cities when the earth has a tantrum. Some of us might even think that it's for the best. How can they be happy without a latte or 42" screen?
We dip into our wallets reverently, but not usually at the expense of our lifestyle or at the thought of necessarily improving somebody else's. It is often more to do with the salvation of our conscience than that of the less well-heeled masses.
What of the cosy environment we have created for ourselves? The temperature is right, adjustable. We can manage well in our cosified human nests. The fridge is full, and food and water is plentiful in the households we know. We can watch in comfort, as the Third World falls into our living room, ravaged faces and skeletal bodies. It can be turned off.
Interesting, poverty from suburbs much closer to home can hardly be seen through the curtain of well-heeled suburbandom - it's too hard to see through the smug. Opportunites galore in Godzone, opportunities for the taking, pick them off the opportunity tree - Opportunitree. All very well, but what if you can't even get to the ladder to reach the branches?
But when the shaking happens in our own neighbourhood, when the earth's tantrums threaten to topple and turnover our own lives, then what? What makes us 'first worlders' more significant than the 'third worlders'?
Does the beggar love his children less than the banker who never sees his?
Just a meander, must be Sunday afternoon. Might go and check out how much goats costs.
No comments:
Post a Comment