Chains are measured by their weakest link. Should societies then, being a chain of generations, be measured by their least fortunate citizens? Why do we not measure ourselves by our least capable components in the same manner as we objectively analyze other systems? Do we truly believe that lip-service and pocket-change will feed our collective hunger, caused by our self-righteous and self-perpetuating moral famine? No. We will continue to float through our collective sub-cultures, cherry-picking our misinformation to maintain our bravado and disenlightenment; woe be upon they whom demonstrate the redeeming qualities left in our human experience, for they must surely be labeled with our current derogatory buzzwords.
We reinforce our absence of real values in all areas of society: churches segregate and condemn, economic classes lay the foundation for corruption and learned behavioral problems, and political parties marginalize and invalidate. We as individuals consume it all with open wallets and mouths, but with closed minds. We lack an economic incentive to do the right thing, and thus we will not. We demand the continued socio-economic stratification of not only our populace, but all who would interact with us. We have no qualms bombing you, if it means we can then rebuild you for a profit. You will be slowly killed by our monetary-market dichotomy, or quickly killed by your resistance to it: your choice.
Is peace merely a placeholder in our lexicon? War proves to be more profitable and we have consistently shown a resistance to defining the word ‘value’ without attaching a monetary connotation. What then is the value of life? Is our value only the sum of our assets? Perhaps this is why we tolerate the staggering number of poverty-related deaths, because the sum of their assets is deemed unworthy in our modern idea of value. We would rather pretend violence is has no environmental contributing factors, and instead incarcerate our undesirables for yet another profit. In the context of contents, why is your wallet more important than our environment?
If we could re-think what it means to be valuable, perhaps then we could alter the cultural and environmental contributing factors that produce people like me to begin with. If our focus was lifting the floor off of the dirt as opposed to pushing the ceiling out of reach, then perhaps many of these issues we so ingloriously ignore would begin to resolve themselves due to cessation of cause. However, where is the profit in healthy people? Where is the profit in peace? Where is the profit in equality?
Chains are measured by their weakest link. What is ours? Perhaps our elevation of money, and the pursuit of it, to its current status: being worth killing and dying for? There is more to life than any one of its parts, but certainly there is more to life than the man-made construct of money and all its detrimental effects in our modern, wasteful, world. Many of us find ourselves in a double-edged vacuum, caught between the few with much and the many with little, and powerless to do hardly anything individually. Fortunately, we are a chain, measured by our weakest link, but capable of forging better more sustainable links to replace the ones to have broken off and need to be added back on – stronger.
(Featured Image: Alone 212 | Chains – March 2012)