Waiting On The World To Change

As I ponder over my upcoming thesis project, I now work in a job in which I get to meet a lot of people and go into their homes. These homes range from modest to very high end, and I come across a wide range of people. I come across people with so much, so much material wealth and stability, and yet last night I watch a TV program in which a child entering kindergarten on his first day, does not know what the three meals of a typical day are called, because there are many times that he will not have eaten for more than a day, and three meals a day are just not a part of his daily reality. That bothers me, so much, and I've been thinking a lot about this sort of thing lately, of how some have so much, and others next to nothing. I come across people with the best of everything, the best health care, the best health insurance, very nice comfortable places to live in, while poor children in this country often go hungry for days on end, and teenagers in some areas live in places where there are literally no businessess in which to apply for a job, because businessess have all fled the inner city long ago. What's the alternative in that situation? How do do you make money for the younger siblings who need milk and something to eat? My city of Denver is not like this; there are at least places where one can go to look for work, but what about places like Camden, NJ, and other places, which employers fled from long ago?

When I see, among others, the fat lady at the grocery store, with the oxygen tubes up her nose, buying her 49 items in the fast lane, then waddling out with her treasures, ready to light up a smoke and jump into her comfortable, luxury middle-class vehicle, it makes me wonder, would she even know that kids go hungry in this country, and more importantly, if she did, would she even care? I think I already know the answer to that one, and I find it disturbing. These are unfortunately the same lard asses who supported Bush in this war, and whose support was absolutely essential for the killing of over 100,000 innocent Iraqis, and who think that poverty is some moral failing. And probably also attend a megachurch too, with hands raised up to Jesus in that feelgood sort of way. What Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil; a lumpen middle-class that goes about its fat and comfortable business, no matter how many die, no matter who goes hungry; as long as its not me, as long as I got mine.

Well, I'd say that you won't find Jesus up in the sky. He lives on the ground in Camden, NJ, and he is in kindergarten, and he is hungry. I think that when we finally realize that, then, and only then, is when the world will finally begin to change.