We live comfortable lives in our rich countries that most of us aren’t really thankful for
As much as I love the freedoms we are blessed with (there are sooooo many, some we don’t even realize are freedoms until we go somewhere else) I am just completely fed up with America and its focus on such trivial garbage as celebrity culture and reality tv
Is the show The Hills really such a great testament to man’s intelligence and creativity?
We all know this shit is scripted (quite badly actually) so why the hell has it been on for so many seasons?
Our lives are so empty that we sit and watch banal conversations between strangers for 30 minutes
These shallow, uninteresting people that offer nothing to the advancement of the human race
And why should we be concerned with what that dude from Twilight is doing every second of the day? Honestly people, that guy is such a bad actor and that movie was way too awkward to be a love story
But just the same we find these strangers so enthralling, so much so that we even wanted to see the picture of a famous woman after she was brutalized by her boyfriend
Lord knows how much TMZ paid for that picture, it was so in demand it was probably enough to build a 20 story, 5 star halfway house for victims of spousal abuse
Even the news is propaganda
Yellow journalism stirring up false passions for the sake of ratings
Even CNN puffs up stories that should have never been given 2 seconds of our attention
Who cares what some beauty pageant contestant thinks anyway?
If we really valued their opinions we wouldn’t parade them around in bikinis and grade them on how good they looked in them
One flips through channels only to find myriad newscasters dramatizing everything while pundits rant and argue.
And all of this takes our attention away from what is really happening in the world, away from the people that truly need us to care about them
We don’t realize that there are people who think we can save them, but how? How when we are so busy worrying about ourselves?
Right now the situation isn’t that great for Americans, a lot of people lost their jobs and are struggling to keep their houses
Our happy little bubble burst
Now, throw in starvation, violence, lack of basic medial care and education, deep-seated and completely justified mistrust of police and government and you have real suffering
We are resilient enough to get through this, we’ve done it before
But there are countries that are stuck in this never-ending cycle of destruction
I watched some of chris rock’s most recent stand-up and he was talking about how fucked up it is that Americans buy bottled water
A child in some remote part of the world has to walk however many miles (more than 20 feet is too much if you ask me) to get clean drinking water, while we don’t deign to drink from our faucets
As chris rock calls it: “ass water”
we drink bottled water and we wash our asses with tap
I’m completely guilty of this too, I’ve been to places where bottled water could be considered a necessity for health reasons but I’m in new jersey for fuck’s sake, I really need to spend 2 bucks on water from Fiji? (all of this while the indigenous inhabitants of Fiji, subjected to the rule of a military junta who is chummy with the water corp. do not have clean drinking water)
Anyway that’s not my point
My point is that while we are so embroiled in our so-called “problems” (in quotations because I think they are really quite small compared to those of places where women get brutally raped if they go to gather firewood to cook and feed their families) we lose perspective
We are in a privileged position to do a lot of good in the world
To alleviate suffering, even if it’s only one person
Saving one life is enough to not feel hopeless in this strange world
Do your part
Idealist.org
Globalgiving.com
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