Domino Effect

I know you didn't notice, unless you were already a follower; I did it again, not remembering the entry day until after the fact, one day earlier than the last...

A big struggle this year has been distinguishing where personal responsibility leaves off and outside circumstances begin, on a very large scale. Call it a blessing or a curse, love it or hate it, when not in the tunnel vision of ‘survival mode’, I’ve been alternately criticized then praised for being able to see ‘the big picture’. To keep that perspective, and a sense of sanity, I seek out to read or listen to anything inspirational and uplifting, including stories of those who have overcome very difficult odds. Sometimes those who tell the stories are not those who have gone through them, though rather others who have become inspired by them as well, who can insert them into a text to make a point. Still, they are not the individuals who endured the same hardships, though they very likely and have had trials of their own.

The media often knowingly shapes our perceptions, though individuals can become extremely defensive of being ‘brainwashed’, for lack of a better term. It is the very thinking they are fed on a daily basis, the uncontrollable need to pick up the daily news or watch it on TV that shapes decisions and judgments. The ‘extremely wealthy’ in our society are largely not affected by what controls the masses; in many instances, the former are the ones who also create the media. Not only today is the gap between the ‘classes’ widening, what most don’t know is the divide between the ‘Haves’ who have consciences, and those who do not. The latter want others to stay poor, and their discontent cannot be satisfied by any dollar amount, thus the extreme rate of their incomes being spent on material trappings, clubs, perks, ‘favors’, and so called ‘self-improvement’ attempts that often abruptly become replaced by something else if any real self-reflection becomes ‘uncomfortable’.

Resources and those it can influence takes precedence over examining root causes that affect and harm many innocent lives the media sometimes tells us with a shred of integrity are in fact the casualties of self-interested decisions several degrees of separation away. Too often, however, we are pounded by the ‘popular wisdom’ that others should pick themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they don’t have boots, or lost them to a higher bidder.

Going to a job one sometimes hates, picking up the paper and coffee, allows us to become numb to how that job, paper, and coffee came into existence sometimes on the backs of innocent children, women, and the elderly. It’s shocking to many that there could even be a connection of these ‘elements’ to each other. The ‘other half’ of the ‘Haves’ will tell a different story. Our discontent and everyday mundane ‘routines’ become an illusion, a ‘shield’ that permits the madness to continue.

We didn’t create the paper (but we bought it and read it, and used it as conversation at the water cooler so as to get along and attempt to bond with the coworkers we are ‘forced’ to coexist with, who make decisions about others). We didn’t make the coffee (but we bought it, harvested from the backs of workers that include children, women with child, and their parents and grandparents in underdeveloped areas). The jobs we hate we cling to, knowing that without trading the hour for the dollar we are much closer to those who reach out with a cup on the train we cannot make eye contact with. The pay that’s never enough is squandered on the ‘necessities’ of newspapers and coffee, to have something to do during commutes so as not to make eye contact with anyone, lost in our thoughts of discontent, reading all that’s ‘wrong’ with the world, in the paper, that we paid for, that paid the ‘Haves’ without a conscience, that we complain are ‘robbing’ the ‘Have nots’, yet it has nothing to do with ‘us’…